B52 - Current Heterodox Approaches: Historical; Institutional; EvolutionaryNávrat zpět

Ambiguous terminology as well as causality and a too wide spectrum of determinants on the demand side of the welfare state are the main drawbacks in the literature on the topic. The aim of this paper is to systematise the literature on individual support for the welfare state. Besides clarification of the terminology and argumentation of prevailing causality (informal institutions → individual support for the welfare state), the paper underlines the importance of individualist values and beliefs; in particular, individual control over one's own life, which can be based on the psychological concepts of locus of control and self-efficacy and can be empirically tested thanks to the WVS/EVS databases.

With respect to the occurrence of economic crises it may be observed that economic performance of countries is determined by the quality of its institutions. It is the corporate governance failure that is said, in line with the new institutional economic theory, to be among reasons for the recent international financial and economic crisis. This study has the goal of confirming, by empirical analysis, the existence of correlation between, on one hand, the quality of the institutional environment expressed by index of economic freedom and by its selected subindexes, and, on the other hand, the macroeconomic environment for corporates - as characterised by selected macroeconomic indicators. In result, countries with higher foreign direct investments influx and higher per capita GDP show higher levels of index of economic freedom. Countries with higher level of property rights protection and lower corruption level achieve higher GDP per capita. Countries with higher ratio of government expenditure on GDP reach lower levels of index of economic freedom, this being interpreted as a substitution of private business entities and entrepreneurial initiative by a government.

The article argues that many failures of economic policies, especially in the developing world, are accountable to the methodological biases of the underlying mainstream economic science. While the new institutional and development economics have substantially improved economic models, they still rely on the neoclassical assumptions of methodological individualism and utilitarism. Therefore, they cannot fully grasp the gender and cultural aspects of the societies living in developing countries, the dynamic character of their economies and their embedment in the natural, social and institutional environment. These scientific biases are analysed from the standpoint of four heterodox economic schools: those of feminist economics, evolutionary economics, ecological economics, and economic anthropology. The subsequent failure of the economic policies is documented by the cross-cutting example of the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the Bretton Woods institutions. The article concludes by emphasizing the common points of the heterodox schools and advocating for a methodological plurality in the Czech economic research and education.

Badly defined institutional framework caused many problems of the Czech transition. Designers of the economic reform did not respect the importance of precisely functioning market institutions. No doubts that building institutions supports the functioning of markets. The article analyses why Czech economists and politicians did not understand the problem in the beginning and how they attempted to correct this initial mistake. The Czech (Slovak) economy was in a worse situation if compared with other central European countries because any private sector did not exist there before 1990. Both formal and informal institutions were built here in the green field. After politically sensitive problems with financial crime the building of institutions was accelerated in late 1990s. The process of re-building Czech market institutions continues within EU now.

The article gives an account of a recent attempt to rebuild economics along the lines of increasing returns. The current orthodoxy is criticised for overemphasizing the role of decreasing returns. For the sake of analytical rigor economists sacrifice a correct picture of the modern world, say the critics. Small events are magnified by the positive feedback. The system is thus set on a path and cannot shake off its history. Path dependent processes are illustrated by the persistence of the QWERTY keyboard. As the world is stuck with this inferior standard, government action is needed to adopt a better alternative. However, the second part of the article offers a successful refutation of the QWERTY story. This particular example of path dependency evolved into an ambitious interdisciplinary project whose aim is to introduce new, visionary approaches into the scientific thinking. The prospects of chaos theory in economics are therefore briefly outlined.

This study stress attention to the effects of imperfect competitive markets, menu costs and firm near rationality upon nominal price rigidity and non-neutrality of money in works of new keynesian economists. New keynesians consider the price rigidity as a direct expression of the firm price decisions in the context of the nominal aggregate demand shock initiated by change in the central bank money supply. But such case of nominal price stability is the result of firm price decision only when it meets combination of "right" parametres of firm demand and supply function, it means "right" slope of marginal revenue and marginal costs function and their stability (anti-cyclical movements of the mark-ups) that is based above all on high firm monopoly power and high elasticity of labor supply. Explanation of the price rigidity should therefore put together the influence of menu costs and near rationality with real price and wage rigidities.