O47 - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output ConvergenceNávrat zpět

This study investigates the impact of public debt on economic growth in a panel of 27 EU economies over the period 2000-2022. As the preliminary analysis suggests a nonlinear relationship between these variables, the debt threshold analysis based on the dynamic panel threshold regression is employed. The results for the whole panel indicate that public debt supports growth below a threshold of 68.7%, but it has a detrimental impact on growth if it is above the threshold. The validity of the findings is confirmed by including the effects of crises, which also indicates that economic growth in countries with debt below the threshold was more resilient to crisis events. The robustness of the estimates is checked using the method of moments quantile regression. However, the analysis of subsamples based on a country's EMU membership and the indebtedness level reveals the variety of debt thresholds, which calls for different fiscal governance across countries to reduce the negative effects of debt on economic growth. Overall, the results emphasize the importance of adequate fiscal space to respond to economic disturbances.

This study investigates the effects of information and communications technology (ICT) on economic growth. Our study focuses on 16 MENA countries from 1995 to 2018. We examine not only the impact of ICT usage and investment but also the moderating role of the quality of national institutions shaping this relationship. The results obtained using the panel ARDL method suggest that while ICT usage drives economic growth, ICT investment alone has a limited effect. Moreover, our research confirms that higher-quality institutions boost the impact of ICT use and investment on economic expansion. These results are essential for policymakers who want to boost ICT's contribution to GDP growth.

The relationship between government size and economic growth is a major task in the economic literature and this paper is devoted to public expenditure. We empirically study the relationship between public expenditure and economic growth in the European Union. Our approach consists on a quantile regression for the period 2004-2019. The results show a negative and significant impact of total public expenditure on economic growth, with a higher effect in the high tail of the growth distribution. In a more detailed analysis, the study of three large public expenditures, considering the percentage of total public expense, reveals an insignificant effect of health, and a negative impact of education and social protection, higher in the low tail of the growth distribution. Our findings allow better understanding of the effects of public policies on development beyond linear approaches.

This study aims to identify growth-conducive institutions unique to emerging economies. For that purpose, we examine the roles of Anglo-American institutions in fostering total factor productivity growth through the improvement of technical efficiency in emerging economies. Specifically, the impacts of the liberalistic and paternalistic types of regulatory institutions are discerned. The results show that institutional qualities such as reverence for the rule of law and effective governments robustly promote total factor productivity by improving technical efficiency, while voices of citizens and political stability exhibit a symbiotic relationship, where the efficacy of one of these qualities requires the sufficient prevalence of another. Regarding regulatory institutions, we found evidence that calls for protectionist policies to foster innovation, which is the key driver of technical efficiency.

The article investigates potential output and output gap modelling and estimation in the Czech Republic in the period 1996-2021, including the global recession from 2008 and the recent crisis caused by government measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. The unobserved components (UC) methodology is applied, coefficients are estimated by the maximum likelihood method, unobserved variables are estimated using the Kalman filter. The standard UC model is modified in an original way to nonlinearly describe the hysteresis effect by allowing the output gap to have an asymmetrical influence on potential output. The econometric model verification proved significance of the hysteresis effect and showed a substantial inertia of negative consequences of both crises. Predictions of an impact of the War in Ukraine on the gap were also calculated and the uncertainty associated with these predictions was quantified.

Economic convergence has become a European research topic of interest during recent decades, particularly since new member countries joined the EU in 2004. Measuring cross-country convergence focuses on real convergence, taking per capita income as a measure of living standards based on the convergence criteria defined by Sala-i-Martin (1996). The objective of this paper is to bring together supply-side (real convergence) and demand-side (BoP-constrained approach) concepts of economic growth aimed at identification of convergence sources in the emerging economies of the Visegrad Group. The sustainability of convergence in this study utilizes the BoP-constrained growth theory developed by A. Thirlwall (1979). Our results show that all the countries in the Visegrad Group exhibit relatively instant convergence, which could continue considering the intensity and direction of structural changes that affect the export demand elasticities and labour productivity.

The essence of fiscal decentralization is to increase economic efficiency in the redistribution of resources in the public sector through more effective satisfaction of local public needs by lower levels of government. The article aims to quantify the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization in relation to economic growth in a sample of 29 OECD countries for the years 1975-2018. Empirical research has shown a nonlinear relationship between the degree of fiscal decentralization and economic growth, which takes a parabolic shape. The optimal degree of fiscal decentralization maximizing economic growth reached the level of 31.3656%, or in the case of per capita growth, the level is 31.1309%. In most V4 countries, the degree of fiscal decentralization is at a lower level compared to the optimal one, which is not leading to maximization of economic growth, or economic growth per capita.

In this paper, I empirically examine the relationship between telecommunications and economic growth. I use data for developing and developed countries for 2000–2016. My conclusion is that mobile penetration has a positive and significant impact on economic growth, where a onepercent increase in mobile penetration results in an increase in economic growth of 1.0–2.6 percent. Regulatory institutions have a positive and significant impact on penetration in developing countries; in developed countries, the impact of regulatory institutions is positive but not significant.

Index number theory interprets the task of measuring productivity change as examining changes between two one-year periods (or other partial time instances). Nonetheless, in practice there arises a need to assess how productivity fared between two periods consisting of several years (or several partial time instances) and what drove its change. The paper focuses on such situations and has two interlinked goals. On the one hand, the paper formulates a methodology for measuring productivity change based on the Hicks-Moorsteen index and on the decomposition into basic determinants after Diewert and Fox. On the other hand, it demonstrates its usability in investigations of trends in productivity of the Slovak banking sector in the area of financial intermediation between the period 2005-2008 and the period 2009-2016. The results point to an improvement in financial intermediation productivity for most banks and an sector-wide upward shift in the production possibility frontier.

The aim of this paper is to explore the influence of public debt structure on economic growth of advanced economies. The investigation mainly focuses on shifts in public debt structure which does not change the level of debt quota. Methodical approach follows similar exercises developed to evaluate the effects of tax shifts on economic growth. Debt decompositions are made according to i) original maturity of instruments; ii) currencies; iii) residency of creditors; iv) kind of instrument. The panel data regression of 24 OECD countries in the period from 2000 to 2014 is used. The main findings suggest that the structure of public debt matters to economic growth in every decomposition made. Moreover, it was found that shifts in debt structure which are neutral towards the level of debt quota could be associated with changes of economic growth rates. Hence, it is legit to deal with adequate public debt structure not only with debt level in terms of influencing the economic growth.

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.

This study is devoted to explore the role and impact size of human capital for economic growth. We discern two levels of human capital impacts: First, we point to its contribution to knowledge capital production and second, the multiplicative effects of human capital in the aggregate production function are suggested. We employ lately developed methodology for spatial panel estimations with two-way fi xed effects. Our results show that throughout the EU NUTS-2 regions over the 2000s human capital spillovers, indeed, account for large total factor productivity variation. Moreover, our results suggest that local effects of human capital are secondary to these human capital spillovers in terms of magnitude and, what might be more compelling, that the multiplicative effects of human capital surmount its impacts attributable to knowledge production.

The article deals with the method of construction of symmetric time input-output tables under conditions of the Czech Republic. It is completely new approach to the description and evaluation of the Czech economy even though the effort to include the factor of time in this evaluation is abroad for quite long. In the Czech Republic are these efforts at the beginning. The method used to achieve the goal is based on the Supply and use tables expressed in time units, which is compiled using relevant data sources. The described results inform about the achieving of this goal. The method leads to the compilation of the symmetric time input-output tables. Some problems are discussed and have to be solved before the derivation of the input-output models from the time input-output tables.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on labour productivity and total factor productivity in the Czech Republic focusing on the period between the years 1995 and 2011. The authors follow the international methodology adapted to the availability of a reliable dataset, and divide the ICT sector in the ICT manufacturing, ICT services and ICT-using sectors. The issue of the quality of data sources and individual indicators entering the analysis is discussed in detail. While in the period between the years 1995 and 2003 the influence of ICT services prevails in the period 2003 and 2011 the influence of ICT using sectors grew much stronger in comparison. In both periods the importance of ICT manufacturing industry is negligible, which is also caused by the methodology of estimation of gross value added and recalculation into constant prices, as well as the low share of value added on production in that sector. Overall, the impact of ICT on the national economic aggregates should not be overstated.

We use the method of ideal Montgomery decomposition to explain differences in product per capita in new member states of EU and selected benchmark country of EU5 ? Netherlands ? on differences in total factor productivity (TFP), capital per inhabitant, rate of capacity utilization, rate of employment, average number of hours worked and in human capital. We find that in 2009 average TFP in new member countries reached only 60% of TFP of the Netherlands. Differences in TFP explain almost 80% of differences in product per capita. We investigate the role of technology and of allocative efficiency in low TFP. Our analysis suggests that unless a lag in technology is longer than 20 years, most part of low TFP is due to inferior allocative efficiency and not due to technology.

Total factor productivity is defined as a relation of product to total factor inputs. Its growth is result of qualitative changes, i.e. intensive factors of growth. For measurement of total factor inputs is used production function with two factors, labor and capital (extensive factors). The paper shows the possibility of direct measurement of total factor productivity. Further, there are derived dynamic parameters which measure the share of intensive and extensive factors in economic growth. They also include the case of fall of product and counter (opposite) changes of growth factors. Average annual growth of real GDP of the Czech Republic between periods 1995-2000 and 2001-2007 accelerated from 1.5 % to 4.5 %. Total factor productivity increased from 1.1% to 3.5 % and was the main factor of this acceleration. Dynamic parameter of intensity in the period of slower growth 1995-2000 shows, that the share of intensive factors was 74 %, while in the period of stronger growth 2001-2007 was 78 % (parameter of extensity was 26 % and 22 % respectively).

The paper is focused on the disputation with Mojmir Hajek on the field of the measurement of the total factor productivity index. We point out the interpretation obstacles connected to this measurement and its results at a level of the whole economy as well as of its industries. We also refer to the sensitivity of the analysis on the methodology used and bring up the alternative computations based on the methodology recommended by ESA 95 standard. Comparing these alternative approaches, it is obvious that the analysis is sensitive both on the later data revisions and on the indicators of input as well. In this case, the differences on the average annual growth of the total factor productivity can reach almost four percentage points. We also point out the difficulty of the contribution analysis of growth while chain-linked data are used.

The paper examines the sources of economic growth in the ten new member states of the European Union (EU-10) and in previous member states (EU-15) as a whole. Special attention is devoted to the Czech republic, both from macroeconomic point of view and from the view of nine industries. For the analyses is used growth accounting method, where factors of production are labour, capital and total factor productivity. With the exception of the Czech Republic and EU-15 the reconstruction of capital stock was needed. We have used perpetual inventory method. The analyses has shown, that the main factor of economic growth in EU-10 was total factor productivity, mainly in the Baltic states. In the Czech Republic the main driving force of macroeconomic total factor productivity was manufacturing industry. The fast growing total factor productivity in EU-10 was the main factor of convergence to EU-15.

The study examines the resources of economic growth in the Czech Republic in the course of years from 1992 until 2004. Using the growth accounting method, it analyses the contribution of individual factors to economic growth. Special attention is given to total factor productivity, which, apart from labour, also includes a fixed capital stock at constant prices. Compared to the previous period, the acceleration of the growth of total factor productivity decisively contributed to the speeding up of economic growth in the years 1999-2004. Furthermore, the study examines growth resources in six national economy sectors and analyses the contribution of individual sectors to the growth of macroeconomic total factor productivity. The analysis has shown that namely industry, transport, communications, and other services were involved in the speeding up of the growth of macroeconomic total factor productivity. A comparison of the dynamics of total factor productivity of the CR and EU-15 at the macroeconomic level has shown that while in 1992-1998, the growth of total factor productivity was slower in the CR, after 1998, it was faster (in 1999-2004, the average annual growth rate in the CR was 2.2% and 0.6% in EU-15). In the years 1996-2004, for which revised data are available for the CR, the average annual growth rate of total factor productivity in the CR was 1.5%, compared to 0.7% in EU-15. The analysis indicated that since 1999, total factor productivity in the CR has been converging to the EU-15 level, accelerating in 2003 and 2004, thereby achieving 63% of the EU-15 level in 2004.

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.