R10 - General Regional Economics (includes Regional Data)Return

Price levels affect real incomes across countries and regions. We compare real incomes of workers and pensioners across 14 regions of the Czech Republic. We find that taking into account regional differences in price levels compresses the income differences between regions for private sector employees, but increases them for pensioners and some groups of public-sector employees. This result is strengthened when we employ microeconomic data to refl ect the education, occupations, age and gender of workers. Private-sector wages in Prague are 43% higher than in the rest of the country, but one half of this difference can be explained by Prague's higher price level and the other half by workers' characteristics. When we take these two factors into account, public-sector wages and pensions are the lowest in Prague. We discuss the benefi ts and costs of the government refl ecting the regional price levels in setting public-sector wages or pensions.

This paper deals with the topic of experimental computations and estimation of regional GDP components by expenditure approach in the NUTS 3 regions of the Czech Republic. As huge amount of data is necessary, this topic has not been successfully solved by official statistics yet. Just one expenditure component - gross fixed capital formation - is regionally published by the Czech Statistical Office, the others, such as final household consumption expenditures, government expenditures or net export balance, are estimated in this paper. Also the net savings of regions are experimentally computed. Different data sources needed to be used for estimations; apart from Czech Statistical Office and Institute for Regional Information data other sources as transportation statistics, health statistics etc. had to be employed. An important related issue is also the regional price level problem, whose implications are discussed in the paper as well. Finally regional differences in the structure of regional GDP are examined.

The article presents information about the new integration theory of sustainable regional development. It is an empirically verified theory; its main components are the business environment quality (BEQ), the innovation potential of companies (IPC), and the use of human resources (UHR). Its foundations can be expressed as follows: an improvement of regional quality of business environment stimulates the development of entrepreneurial activities with positive impacts on employment rate and creation of innovations; thus generated synergic effects reinforce the territorial integration of economy and regional competitiveness, which form the basic prerequisites for sustainable regional development. The objective validity of the theory has been confirmed mainly based on hypotheses that BEQ values have strong links to GDP level and further and correspond with the population of regions as the essential measure of their significance. Application of theory allowed formulating a regional development strategy of the Czech Republic.