E62 - Fiscal PolicyNávrat zpět

The paper employs a form of the panel ARDL-based error correction model (ECM) to explore the short-run and long-run relationship between public debt (and certain macroeconomic variables) and economic growth in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. It covers the period 2006Q1−2018Q4. The results indicate both short-term and long-term causality (except for financial development), though the marginal effects are variable-specific. There is a negative effect of public debt, interest rate and exchange rate on growth, whereas the saving rate, trade openness, financial development, fixed capital formation and population growth contribute to economic development. Thus, a responsible and saving-oriented fiscal policy, coupled with higher private sector investment, an export-oriented private sector and undervalued real exchange rate, and population growth would contribute to economic development in CEE countries.

The present paper deals with the impact of supranational fiscal rules on economic growth through optimal government size and the BARS curve in monetary unions. Monetary unions introduce supranational fiscal rules to ensure fiscal sustainability of public finance and to eliminate the presence of free-riders in these country groupings. The main objective of the paper is therefore to illustrate how compliance with the supranational fiscal rules affects the level of economic growth under the conditions of the existence of the BARS curve in monetary unions. The paper confirms the existence of the BARS curve. It makes a quantification of the optimal government size in the East African Monetary Union (26.96% of GDP) and a subsequent identification of years when supranational fiscal rules prevented increase in public expenditures via debt financing and thus counteracted the decline in economic growth.

The relation between government deficit and debt is not straightforward and draws intensive attention of users and analysts. In reality, surplus balances can accompany increasing debt even in the long term. The objective of the paper is thus to scrutinize, by analysing international data, the closeness of both aggregates, which is essential for assessment of the long-term sustainability of public finances. The text explains factors entering between both macroeconomic indicators, as they are currently defined. Furthermore, the text discusses alternatives to currently defined debt and their closeness to the government final balance. The development of indicators is analysed using data for the Czech Republic. Within the data availability constraints, an international comparison of balance sheet indicators is presented.

The paper analyses episodes of successful reduction of public debt in OECD countries. From 2008 to 2018, we identify 19 episodes of fiscal consolidation, of which five resulted in a significant debt reduction. The most successful post-crisis concept is extensive, long-term consolidations and consolidations started with excessive initial debt. Spending cut consolidations have not been significantly more successful than the tax increase approach. After the inclusion of projections for 2019 and 2020, we identified 18 episodes of significant debt reduction, of which nine were associated with previous fiscal consolidation and nine were not. In the years after successful consolidation, the primary balance surpluses were more effective in debt reduction than the macroeconomic environment. Economic growth and interest rates in the significant debt reduction episodes associated with previous consolidation were lower than those without that connection. Countries which have achieved significant debt reduction without previous consolidation have done so primarily by better macro development and profited from a lower level of indebtedness.

This article builds on long-term research by authors in the field of tax burden and its impacts, incorporating a newly designed indicator of legal uncertainty in the tax area which is conceived on the basis of a detailed description of the legislation. This indicator, together with other important factors, is incorporated into the tax system model and its links and influence on the behaviour of economic actors are examined. The aim of the article is to evaluate the impact of legal uncertainty in taxation on the labour supply in the Czech Republic. From a methodological point of view, DSGE modelling and quarterly data for the period 2002-2016 are used. The main conclusion of the study is the confirmation of the negative impact of uncertainty on all examined taxes. At the same time, in all the cases, a shift from the official to the shadow economy occurs. Úvod

This paper studies the impact of inflation dynamics on a common economic policy in the monetary union using a small New Keynesian model of the monetary union. We are considering two open economy versions of the Phillips curve: a typical New Keynesian Phillips curve with only forward looking dynamics and a hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve with forward and backward looking dynamics. The main findings are as follows: (i) the backward looking dynamics (persistence) of inflation in the Phillips curve is an important determinant of the common economic policy in the monetary union; (ii) in the case of asymmetric dynamics of inflation in the monetary union countries, the country with more persistent inflation dynamics has a significant impact on the common economic policy.

The sovereign debt crisis inside the European Monetary Union (EMU) as well as competitiveness problems of some EMU members made the members and non-members of the club address one question: Is a monetary union advantageous? This paper deals with the issue whether or not the Maastricht criteria are good indicators for deciding to join the eurozone, namely for a small open economy, as the Czech Republic. In particular, this analysis addresses the issue of price competition, which can be measured by the real effective exchange rate. In fact, the Maastricht criteria do not reflect the competitiveness of a country. Thus the arguments concerning the advantages/disadvantages of the adoption of a common currency should not be based only on the Maastricht criteria, but at first on the philosophy of the real effective exchange rate. We define a basis for setting new criteria to decideing on joining the monetary union. To sum up, if depreciation/devaluation of the real exchange rate is not a competitive advantage for both Czech exports and the Czech economy (especially in the long term), then the main economic argument against joining the EMU disappears.

Conditional Political Budget Cycle in the OECD Countries Examination of the so called political business cycle (i. e. macroeconomic cycle induced by the political cycle) provides little evidence in empirical studies. The empirical evidence of statistically signifi cant increase in the economic activity before election is especially a matter of less developer countries. There is a shift in focus to the examination of the political budget cycle in case of the developed economies. This paper examines the presence of conditional political budget cycle (PBC) in the OECD countries using data from all 34 member states over the period 1995- 2012. We suppose that the conditionality of the PBC depends on the credibility and transparency of the fi scal policy. The dynamic panel linear regression model is used in this article. Generalized method of moments (GMM) with instrumental variables (IV) is used for estimating arameters in this model. Three important results emerge: First, there is a PBC in the OECD countries. Second, the PBC in OECD countries strongly depends on credibility and transparency of fi scal policy. Third, the shape of the PBC in the OECD countries indicates that there is an immediate fi scal restriction after the elections.

The aim of this article is to estimate the mutual interaction of monetary and fiscal policy in the Visegrad Group countries, i.e. in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary. The relations between monetary and fiscal policy - its coordination, cooperation or mutual antagonism - are basic determinants of successful economic policy implementation of each country. Fiscal and monetary policies usually have different aims. Therefore, some conflict situations may arise in practical economic and political decision-making process. Methodical approaches of this article are based on the game theory, which deals with the analysis of a wide range of decision-making situations with more participants (players); it is primarily focused on the conflict situations. Our results confirm the stabilizing role of monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, also the dominant role of monetary policy in the Czech Republic and the dominant role of fiscal policy in Hungary. In the case of Slovakia, inconsistent results concerning the monetary policy role are probably caused by its EMR II membership and Eurozone entry in 2009.

The paper presents a model of the level of social expenditure in 30 European countries, namely the EU 27 states, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. The aim is to explain the development of social expenditure levels in the period 1990-2010 and estimate it's sensitivity to basic economic, social, political and institutional determinants. Over 60 potential determinants are derived from the literature and analysed theoretically, and 21 of these variables are used as independent variables in the regression (a fixed-effects model with robust standard errors). Five variables are identifi ed as both robust and theoretically consistent. Social expenditure levels seem to depend on unemployment, GDP growth, population ageing, GDP per capita and the openness of an economy. The results confirm the theory of socio-economic determination of the level of social expenditure. Empirical evidence for other theoretical explanations is not robust, as it is strongly dependent on the exact model specification.

The Slovak economy is experiencing another significant phase of fiscal consolidation in its history. Unlike previous episodes of major consolidation in our history, our economy cannot "rely" on a soft cushion in the form of favourable global economic situation, integration and launch of new capacities in the automotive industry, as it was in 2003-2005 and 2011. The main objective of this paper is to estimate the size of fiscal multipliers in Slovakia in order to quantify the impact of fiscal packages in 2011 and 2013. The results show that the expenditure oriented consolidation has higher costs in form of lost growth. However, in the medium to long term it is less painful. Effect of consolidation package on GDP growth in 2011 is estimated at -0.99 percentage points. In 2013, we estimate that the fiscal consolidation cuts the growth of 0.68 percentage points.

The aim of the article is to explore how the results of the U. S. subprime mortgage crisis influenced economic policy of governments in highly developed countries. It analyses consequences of a state intervention especially for government budgets and a rise of government debts. Then the article discusses the point of view of the Austrian school. Austrian economists argue a state is not an economic subject and its fiscal policy is very dangerous for effective allocation of the available resources of production's factors. They advocate a society with a small government and liberal economic policy. The author believes that Austrian approach to economic problems is more realistic and more pertinent than the approach of those, who demand more government intervention.

In January 2008 the Czech Republic introduced the environmental taxation based on the directive 2003/96/EC, restructuring the Community framework for the taxation of energy products and electricity. Environmental taxes are imposed on electricity, solid fuels and natural gas. This paper discusses impacts of environmental taxation in the Czech Republic in the period after its implementation, particularly impacts on price indexes of energy intensive sectors, structure of energy products consumption in the economy and production of CO2 emissions by sectors ranking among EU ETS. The paper is divided into six parts. The first part is the introduction where both the main target of the paper and four hypotheses for testing are formulated. The theoretical problems which are connected with the impact of taxation and tax incidence are discussed in the second part. The third part describes the ideas and expectations of lawmakers regarding environmental taxation implementation, precisely European Commission, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic. In the fourth part authors describe the methodology and data, provide results of ex-post analysis based on both linear and non-linear correlation analyses. The next part deals with the discussion of the results and the hypotheses testing. The last part, conclusion, focuses on the main ex-post analysis findings and formulates the recommendations.

This paper analyzes the effects of macroeconomic shocks on the government debt dynamics in an open economy using the analytical framework of Favero and Giavazzi (2007) extended to an open economy. Applying this modelling approach to the data for the Czech Republic, the authors derive some implications for fiscal policy. The modelling framework includes structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model, estimated using short-term identification restrictions, and non-linear specification of the government debt dynamics. The main variables of the analyzed system are GDP, inflation, the effective interest rate on government debt, government revenues and expenditures, the exchange rate and government debt. The estimation is carried out using the Bayesian approach. The results suggest that allowing for a non-linear dynamics in the government debt to GDP ratio could imply stronger persistence and higher volatility in the responses of government indebtedness to macroeconomic shocks. The fiscal stance of the Czech Republic seems to be most vulnerable to unexpected depreciation of the local currency, discretionary pro-cyclical increases in government expenditures, and deflationary shocks.

We analyze corruption and economic freedom links to public finance and investment in new EU members. In terms of the public investment our results show that improvement in economic freedom is linked to increases in public investment while lowering of corruption is linked with increase or decrease with respect to public investment. As a complementary finding we show that increases in public investment are also linked with the ambiguous effect. In case of public finance our estimates suggest that debt usually decreases as economic regulation goes down while the effect on budget deficit goes both ways. On other hand, as corruption declines both budget deficit and debt decrease. Based on our results we generalize that measures taken to lower corruption and economic regulation should lead to improvements in fiscal position in most of the new EU member states.

The Stability and Growth Pact has become a primary fiscal policy framework in all European countries since 1997. Together with Maastricht fiscal criteria it determines the fiscal discipline of integration process. The aim of this study is to evaluate ex-post effectiveness of the fiscal rules from the view of a primary structural balance development during 1991-2007. A method taken for the evaluation was a panel-corrected standard errors regression with fixed effects applied on the former euro zone countries (EA12), "old" EU members (EU15) and finally on the EU25. The results of the econometric estimation indicate that all considered rules were effective even though with different impacts. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that electoral cycle, among others, has strong impact on the primary structural component of public balance. However against theoretical assumptions, there is not a conclusive statistical significance of the government behaviour on the current state in the business cycle.

The Czech Republic has introduced new energy taxation in connection with implementation of the directive 2003/96/EC, restructuring the Community framework for the taxation of energy products and electricity. New energy taxes are imposed on electricity, solid fuels and natural gas, with term of initiation on 1st January 2008. This paper discusses impact of new energy taxation on sectors NACE in the Czech Republic, particularly on prices of production. I have created the simple short-term price model for the Czech Republic, which is based on input-output methodology by Leontief. The paper is divided into six parts. The first part is introduction, where are formulated both the main target of the paper and two hypotheses for testing. The theoretical problems, which are connected with the impact of taxation and tax incidence, are discussed in the second part. The third part describes possibilities of analysing and modelling in the area of changes of tax system and tax rates. In the fourth part I describe the methodology and then I am creating the short-term price model for the Czech Republic. The next part consists of the main results, emerged from the price model and the two hypothesis testing, with focus on energy intensive sectors of NACE. The last part, conclusion, summarizes the main results and formulates the possibilities of additional research in energy taxation area.

The paper focuses on selective investment incentives. The main aim is to discuss question how to quantify net fiscal impact properly. As shown, the problem is not trivial - the proper quantification presupposes using of several parameters, accounting of costs in the economic sense of this word (i.e. also opportunity costs) and using concept of present value. Including these aspects in the calculation would correct some extremely optimistic scenarios (of studies concerning Czech economy), which claim, that fiscal incentives yield significantly high net surplus to the state budget. The parameter representing the ability of incentives to attract investors seems to be one of the most important components of the correct calculation. Another important point is a necessity of symmetric accounting: some of the other studies implement two expenditures rounds on the side of fiscal benefits, whereas they neglect the second round on the side of costs.

This paper attempts to contribute to the analysis of links between state aid and competitiveness of manufacturing industries during 1998-2002. Statistical source on subsidies include all subsidies to capital gathered on enterprise level by Czech Statistical Office. The enterprise data have been aggregated by economic activity on 3digit level and competitiveness was defined as adjusted market shares of 3digit industries. Competitiveness on domestic markets is defined as the share of industry output sold on domestic market on the total domestic demand and competitiveness on the European market is defined as the share of industry export to EU market on the total European demand. In the first step we described subsidies to manufacturing industries and we aimed to answer the question what industries get the subsidies. In the second step we identified competitive industries on domestic and foreign markets. In the core part we analyzed links between subsidies and competitiveness of manufacturing industries in both static as well as dynamic perspective based on correlations. Our analysis confirmed that state subsidies are allocated to industries that have a strong position on the domestic markets and that state subsidies are not related to the competitiveness improvement.

It is well known that in EMU the degree of similarity in the composition of current expenditures is relevant since the way Member States are affected by external shocks depends at least in part on this composition. In the 8 postsocialist countries recently admitted to the EU (EU-8) the mean value of both current revenue and expenditure correspond to this of EU-12 for the period 1993-2007 (first of all Slovakia and Hungary). Lower are the values in the Baltic States. The dynamics of expenditure on social protection exhibits a clear picture-the main tendency in EU-8 is to decrease the ratio of this kind of expenditure on GDP. Taking into account the functional classification of government expenditure (COFOG) we see that social protection is the largest category of government expenditure for all EU Member States. Only in Poland and Slovenia these outlays correspond to the EU-15 average (in the Baltic states the social protection is very low). The coefficients of variation for the functional catagories of government expenditure display a wider volatility in EU-8 than in the older countries of EU. Panel analysis-(fixed effect models) are in accordence with simple correlations and show that only the unemployment rate has had the expected positive relationship with social transfers for the majority of EU-8 countries. The more profound analysis of the Czech Republic displays the increasing redistribution of GDP since the year 2002.

The study focuses on evaluation of institutional quality in European Union countries and its possible impact on economic performance and competitiveness. The text stems from the theoretical framework of new institutional economics, especially historical and comparative institutionalism, and it bases on the concept of good governance. The source of the evaluation is the scheme of the World Bank Governance Matters, supplemented with research of other institutions working with individual institutional characteristics. Authors evaluate following characteristics - voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption, which together form aggregate indicator of institutional quality. Old member countries of European Union (EU-15) are classified into different models of capitalism according to their different institutional quality. Institutional changes in new member countries (EU-10, eventually EU-8) in period 1996-2004 illustrate both institutional adjustment of postcommunist countries and dynamics of these changes and their convergence to different types of capitalism.

Daniel Bernoulli's explanation of Petersburg paradox is a special case of general Weber-Fechner's law for area of economy. Till now, this law used to be used outside the area of physics only very rarely. From social point of view, more attention should be payed to subjective perception of economic quantities. This leads to more often use of geometrical mean. Considering Weber-Fechner's law, I can receive a non-traditional view on so called equal taxation.

Panel data are increasingly being used in both macro- and micro-level studies of economic problems. Macro-panel data (i denotes countries) are characteristic by sufficiently long time series to be able to analyze panel spurious regression and panel cointegration. According to the main stream of the economic theory the budget deficits leads to deterioration in the current account balance. The panel long-run causal relation is examined in the case of the four groups of countries. For the Granger causality test the panel cointegration analysis is needed. The panel cointegration relationships were not found in any case. Some similarities in the panels were found in the case of Latin America countries but they are not significant.

The purpose of this model is to measure the impact of localization of new (mostly industrial) enterprises in strategic industrial zone in regional economy. Model deals with multiplication effect of regional consumption expenditures, which is (among others) strongly affecting development of regional economy. For modeling the regional consumption demand or regional consumption expenditures there was used mainly microeconomic approach based on utility and profit maximization. The model is based on several simplifying assumptions for better use in real applications (mainly because of lack of relevant regional data). This model was used in practice for ex-ante evaluation of impact of strategic industrial zone in Cheb but it could be applied widely (after some modifications) for anticipation of regional impacts of demand shocks, regional migration, investments etc.

The paper focuses on selective investment incentives, which are aimed primarily to attract foreign direct investment, in the context of the new EU Member States, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We discuss the issue within three closely related dimensions. We point to a potential conflict of interests between host country governments and multinational companies in promoting technology spillovers from foreign direct investment in the host economies. We examine the prisoner dilemma of the host governments in mutual competition for mobile direct investment and a room to achieve multilateral or strengthening regional agreement on investment to reduce a possible wealth reducing content of such policies. Finally, we discuss national context of the investment incentives with regards to the rent-seeking behaviour of various interest groups and contradictory role of the investment promotion agency in the process of decision-making about investment promotion policies. We conclude with brief implications for development policy.

Macroeconomic policy is often evaluated solely on the basis of empirical evidence, such as observing the behavior of macroaggregates. This paper argues that this approach bears a shortcoming: "improvement" of macroaggregates can be socially undesirable under certain circumstances. Thus the sole exploration of macroaggregates is not sufficient to evaluate the macroeconomic policy -axiomatic economic theory must be used as well to determine whether the outcomes of macroeconomic policy are beneficial to society or not. The paper first offers a precise definition of a social welfare function (based as much as possible on microfoundations). Then it considers the possibility that macroaggregates might not always correlate with society's welfare. Some illustrations are covered too.