Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(5):496-517
With the advancement of machine learning tools, an increasing number of algorithms are being utilized for predicting not only traditional time series data related to financial markets but also those connected to cryptocurrencies. This paper aims to compare various machine learning algorithms used for prediction, in order to identify the one with the greatest practical potential for creating a prediction model of Bitcoin’s price as an investment asset. The analysis focuses on supervised learning algorithms, taking into account the nature of the task involving long time series datasets. The paper also describes the exact process of creating and...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(4):447-472 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1393
In most cases, the rules of the game in international trade are shaped by political economy, but this interplay is more noticeable in politically sensitive sectors such as agriculture. The balance between domestic political interests and the considerations concerning international relations changes over time in response to the joint action of a variety of factors, and this is mirrored in the multilateral trade regime governing this sector. Combining a broad set of empirical evidence available at the international level, this paper aims to capture the pattern of tariff and non-tariff protectionism in the global agricultural trade. The investigation...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(4):473-495 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1395
Voters' ability to act upon the fulfilment of election pledges matters profoundly for democratic accountability. Existing literature provides evidence of retrospective voting on pledge fulfilment at the party level. This paper investigates retrospective voting on pledges at the level of individual politicians. It estimates the effect of breaking a pledge to support anti-corruption legislation on Czech deputies' preferential votes. Since the pledge was identical for all the participating de- puties and not all deputies pledged, the data permit estimation of the effect of pledge breakage independently of the effect of voting against anti-corruption bills....
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(4):422-446 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1391
The paper shows an econometric approach to environmental taxes, economic growth and go- vernment expenditures in Visegrad Group (VG) countries from 1995 to 2018. The aim of this research is to explore how environmental taxes affect economic growth in Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in the observed period. The subject of the research is to identify the relationship between total environmental tax revenues, energy tax revenues, transport tax revenues and economic growth. Also, empirical research includes the relation between environmental taxation and government expenditures to identify the character of their effects and influence on economic growth...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(4):390-421 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1389
The aim of this article is to find out how the state and EU subsidies paid in the Czech Republic since 2000 have been translated into the territory. The methodology is based on obtaining a continuous time series of data on subsidies for the smallest possible territorial level and comparing the impacts on territorial cohesion, with particular reference to structurally affected regions on the one hand and the areas of Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) and Integrated Plan for the Development of the Territory (IPRÚ) on the other. The results show that the share of subsidies has increased steadily over the period under review. Per capita funding...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(4):366-389 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1387
The aim of this study is to verify the validity of Barro-Ricardo equivalence in Czech conditions with the help of experimental methods. Ricardian equivalence, in which case consumers postpone consumption under lower taxation, is a basic assumption of many studies dealing with intertemporal decision making and has important implications for government tax policy. Using nonparametric methods and panel data regression, we find that Ricardian equivalence does not hold in general. Our results suggest that taxation has a significant impact on consumption decisions. Over the life cycle, a tax cut increases consumption on average by 28.7% of the tax credit....
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(3):342-365 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1392
The present study aims to indicate whether structural transformation has provided enhancement for the disadvantaged parts of society in terms of gender or whether it has been implemented at the expense of social inequalities in 10 BEM (Big Emerging Market) economies (Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and Türkiye) in the period 1998–2019. The study also aims to understand the dynamics behind the connection between structural transformation and unemployment by comparing the results from each country. This paper also focuses on the effects of economic complexity on the breakdown of unemployment...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(3):319-341 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1390
This paper investigates multiscale causal relations between consumer and producer prices in eight emerging Eastern European countries. We use wavelet coherence to measure the multiscale nexus between inflation types, and wavelet-based Bayesian quantile regression (BQR) to inspect the spillover effect. Wavelet coherence plots indicate low coherence in the short time horizon (up to two months) and higher coherence in the longer time horizons, particularly from four mounts onwards. Areas of very high coherence are found around the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Bidirectional spillover effect exists in all the countries except Poland...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(3):291-318 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1388
The non-maturing deposit (NMD) pass-through rate represents a key parameter needed in the process of managing interest rate risk of the banking book (IRRBB). NMD interest rates for retail and corporate segments are usually not directly linked to market interest rates, but depend rather on the bank’s marketing strategy, market competition, liquidity, and possibly on other factors. The ratio at which banks adjust their NMD interest rates to changes in interbank market interest rates is known as the NMD pass-through rate. The goal of this paper is to analyse the variability of NMD pass-through rates in the 19 Eurozone countries and identify...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(3):267-290 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1386
This article aims to determine and evaluate factors influencing migration behaviour and decision to migrate in 14 regions of the Czech Republic in the periods 1995–2018 and 2004–2018 (after the accession to the EU). The panel data analysis conducted mostly confirms our hypotheses on the impact of the analysed factors, confirming the impact of GDP growth, number of job listings at Labour Offices, number of job applicants, employment in industry and number of finished dwellings. The exceptions are the variables for the crime rate and number of college students in the region, where we found a positive but barely statistically significant...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(3):238-266 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1385
The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the long-term effects of money supply, economic growth, interest rate, exchange rate, domestic credits and the oil price on inflation in Haiti, Sudan, Türkiye and Zambia, which are among the world’s highest-inflation countries according to 2021 data. For this purpose, a panel cointegration approach is applied where fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) techniques are employed to explore the long-term effects with the help of annual data for the period 2000–2019. Also, the Dumitrescu and Hurlin panel causality test is used to determine...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):226-237 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1383
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):199-225 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1384
The present work is based on a hypothesis that the Czech economy was showing signs of economic deceleration and a potential slump into deeper growth problems way before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e., at least in the year 2019. However, the present text does not intend to thoroughly confirm this hypothesis because in order to do so, a longer timeline of key economic indicators needs to be analysed. What it does present is at least a partial argumentation supporting the abovementioned hypothesis and some basic calculations. It proposes two ways towards its confirmation. The first one is a comparative analysis of individual - especially...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):177-198 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1380
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...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):153-176 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1381
The article focuses on the relationship between the general government balance and the current account of the balance of payments. The aim is to summarize the existing knowledge about the relationship based on the twin deficit theory and to carry out an empirical verification. As part of the analysis, the Granger causality method is first applied to each EU country separately, and then the threshold panel regression method is used. For the subsequent estimation of the threshold panel model, the direction of the relationship from the general government balance to the current account is considered based on the results of Granger causality. Within the...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):130-152 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1378
Studies on the long-term trends of quality of life, and more specifically, the Human Development Index (HDI), have thus far largely neglected East Central Europe, and the existing scholarship tends to be fragmented. The paper seeks to address these shortcomings in research by investigating the trends of the HDI in Poland, Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Czechia and Slovakia, as well as Hungary between 1913 and 2010 within a broader international context. The analysis is based on a new data set developed by the authors. The results demonstrate that the HDI performance of the later decades of state socialism was more moderate than it is commonly...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(2):104-129 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1382
Considerable diffusion of technology occurs via global trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) while firm heterogeneities cause considerable production heterogeneities. Hi-tech products and investment goods of differentiated varieties from emerging and developed economies are vehicles of superior technology. Given this stylized evidence, we analyse factors facilitating (or inhibiting) technological spillover to domestic firms in the host nations in a counterfactual scenario of a Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP) deal. By using a mixture interface of global computable general equi-librium (CGE) models of FDI (GTAP-FDI) and firm heterogeneity...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(1):89-103 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1368
This article studies the environmental and societal impacts of a polluting monopoly when a society strives for a clean environment. Two scenarios are considered: (1) the government levies an environmental tax to induce investment in emission-reducing technology, and (2) the monopolist engages in environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is shown that taxation has a lower environmental impact, but the monopolist undertakes CSR activities only if the abatement technology is efficient. Social welfare is always higher under CSR; therefore, when the technology is not adequately efficient, the government should implement a second-best environmental...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(1):68-88 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1375
The public finances of the Czech Republic fell into deep deficits during the pandemic, while the money supply growth rate accelerated. We make a basic comparison of monetary acceleration during the first two years of the pandemic with other countries. We verify that this acceleration in the Czech Republic was partly due to commercial banks increasing credit to the government. We argue that purchases of government bonds by non-residents have a similar effect. This is particularly true when non-residents use existing koruna deposits held by them, partly as a result of past foreign exchange interventions, to purchase government bonds. While there was...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(1):46-67 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1370
The core of this paper is an econometric estimation of the relation between financial stress and a number of macroeconomic variables (consumption, real GDP, investment, unemployment). This estimation is done on Turkish quarterly data for the period 2002-2021 using threshold vector autoregression (i.e., TVAR). The paper observes the non-linear trade-off between financial stress and macroeconomic indicators. The effect of financial stress appears to be adverse when the stress level is already at a higher level. During high stress episodes, any further increase in financial stress drags economic growth down and the effect appears to be prolonged...
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(1):23-45 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1377
The social policy of the European Union is focused mainly on the most vulnerable group of citizens. The social instruments that countries use to increase the living conditions and to decrease social exclusion and vulnerability can differ between countries. The submitted paper uses cluster analysis to compare 27 member states of the European Union based on their social policy instruments in 2019. The study analyses the dependence of social policy instruments and household financial vulnerability using correlation and regression analysis. It examines whether higher levels of social benefits and government expenditure result in lower financial vulnerability....
Politická ekonomie 2023, 71(1):1-22 | DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1379
The main topic of this article is the bilateral trade in value added between the USA and China. The goal is to look at this bilateral trade in the context of "the new wave of globalization". To fulfill this broadly specified goal the article tries to answer following questions: How much are the USA and China involved in global value chains (GVC)? What is the development of the classical bilateral trade using the balance of payments methodology? Where does the value added in exports come from (geographical structure)? Are there any differences between different industry sectors? One of the main findings is that domestic value added in trade between...
