O12 - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic DevelopmentNávrat zpět

This article provides a brief but comprehensive overview of microfinance academic literature with emphasis on recent innovations, trends and efficiency. In particular, we focus on controversial issues of microfinance, such as commercialization, regulation, interest rate policy and the balance between outreach and performance of MFIs. In summary, the findings of the reviewed literature underline the great improvement in the microfinance field that, however, has not reached its full potential yet. At the same time, we outline potential risks and drawbacks which are being discovered along the way of microfinance development and maturing, many of which still waiting for more rigorous scholarly examination.

The paper presents results of World Bank survey in 2005 undertaken within the project Doing Business, with special regard to the Czech Republic position. Doing business conditions are assessed particularly according to the regulation burden and its impacts on entrepreneurship. The structure follows ten indicators of doing business conditions covered in the survey in 2005: starting and closing a business, dealing with licenses, hiring and firing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts. The paper includes explanation of the specific features of the Czech Republic legislation, and already undertaken, recommended or prepared changes directed to improvement of most critical points. Moreover, there are presented the relations between regulation quality and other economic and institutional indicators: tax burden, economic freedom and corruption levels.

The article is based on the thesis that institutional quality influences the economic performance. From this point of view under certain circumstance the government policy is able to increase efficiency and performance of economies through creation, maintenance and cultivation of appropriate political and economic institutions ("political and economic design"). This way is not about state engineering indeed, but about possibility to accept and/or cancel measures which in principle influence both current production capability of economies and its long-term potential too. Authors do not refuse to analyse an influence of informal institutions, which undoubtedly create "the spawn, out of all grown up". If the state were to be understood in its minimal role, i. e. as the guarantee and co-creator of basic "well-established" rules and/or institutions, the rational economic policy could be able to influence the process both to reduce transaction costs and to rise economic efficiency.

The core aim of this paper is to suggest comprehensive definition of the information economy and delineate the range of economic problems it deals with, paying particular attention to its connections to the economics of information. The text, in the extent provided, can not investigate thoroughly all the subjects associated with the information economy; it rather presents overview of the most important issues and illustrates them with examples from real and virtual markets. The major subjects concerned include: information asymmetries, revelation principle, network effects and externalities, economies of scale, standard wars, switching costs and lock-ins, multiple competitive equilibria, characteristics of online markets, impact of information technology on productivity, implications for governmental policies.