Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

The financial efficiency of the Czech companies in the period 1996 – 2005, measured by return on capital and revenues did not develop very favourably, until the year 2000, when things changed to favourable development. This article examines the factors that influenced this development and indicates the ways pointing to improvement. The analyses showed that substantial share on a creation of economic value added in the average Czech industrial company has macro-economic policy, launched in the areas of the price of loan capital and of legal entity income tax. The accelerator of the growth of financial efficiency of the enterprises will be internal factors disregarded in this analysis, that include the new products and technologies, which are conductive to decrease the share of costs on revenues. Keywords: financial efficiency of enterprises, return on assets, return on equity, factors of growth, macroeconomic policy JEL Classification: D21, L50

The main aim of the article is to examine the issue of ‘current account sustainability’ in selected transition countries. For this purpose, two accounting frameworks (Milesi-Ferreti and Razin, 1996; Reisen, 1998) based on certain strict assumptions are employed. The results show that if the observed level of foreign direct in-vestment (FDI) flows is kept in the medium run almost all countries could optimally have a higher level of external deficit, with the exception of countries such as Baltic States, Hungary, Macedonia, Moldova and Romania. Accordingly, as part of strengthening the growth prospective and external positions a rapid entrance into the European Union (EU) and into the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), together with the further promotion of FDI and a prudent fiscal policy should become necessary elements of the economic policy created in the region. In the end, the results indicate that current account deficits of transition countries that exceed 5 per cent of GDP generally involve problems of their external sustainability. Keywords: transition, current account deficits, sustainability, FDI, forecasting JEL Classification: F32, F34, F37

After the collapse of Bretton Woods’s system, the foreign exchange interventions have experienced the periods of rises and falls and neither theoretical, nor empi-rical studies were able to agree on its efficiency. This paper summarizes the results of previous researches, and introduces and evaluates the theoretical transmission channels – the portfolio-balance channel, the signalling channel, and noise trading theory. The greatest attention is given to the noise trading theory, which represents the latest transmission channel and reflects the micro-structure of foreign exchange markets. Keywords: sterilized intervention, foreign exchange market, noise trading theory JEL Classification: F31, E58, G15

This article identifies selected aspects connected with so-called innovation approach to long waves in the context of the tradition of searching economic cycle theories. Since the end of the 19th century a great number of the long wave concepts has been developed, in particular we can point out the key works by Kondratieff and Schumpeter. The key role in the important line of efforts to clarify the mechanism through internal reasons is given to the innovations. Among outstanding successors of this „Schumpeterian“ approach, Mensch and Valenta have been classified. Despite the non-standard concept, despite some problematic aspects and not fully detailed elaboration the instrumentarium of long waves can be considered as a useful tool, for instance, for clarification of the background of the historical events, ideas on globalization and for development predictions. Keywords: economic cycles, long waves, innovations, N. D. Kondratieff, J. A. Schumpeter, F. Valenta JEL Classification: B59, O10, N00

In this paper, we describe three methods of cost-function analysis in health care: classical econometric analysis, frontier analysis, and survivor analysis. The strength of classical econometric analysis is a highly developed methodology of hypothesis testing; the weakness is that it is necessary to deal with many problems related to estimation technique, such as multicollinearity, autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, etc. The strength of stochastic frontier analysis is that it incorporates random shocks in efficiency evaluation; on the other hand, strong assumptions about the distribution of efficiency have to be made. The advantages of survivor analysis are its simplicity and the possibility to include the factors that are otherwise hard to measure; the disadvantages are the applica-tion only in the long-term studies, and the provision of no specific information on the character of cost function in the studied industry. Different methods have strengths and weaknesses and the choice of the appropriate method depends on the objective of the study. Keywords: cost function, econometric analysis, frontier analysis, survivor analysis, health care JEL Classification: C10, D24, I10

By employing the concept of social capital, the author argues that the best measure of theoretical development for any economic theory of organization is its contribution in the understanding of social capital. In this way, social capital is becoming one of the key factors of evolutionary changes within the economic theory of organization. The author further wishes to point out how the evolutionary progress in economic theory of organization brings about increasingly improved understanding of relations in the theoretical models. However, the concession required for this improvement is a lower degree of theoretical generalization and more intense heterogeneity of the economic theory itself. The less effort an economic theory of organization devotes to being theoretically impeccable, the more abundant are the increasing returns it yields through its findings with regard to the aspect of social capital. Keywords: economic theory of organization, social capital JEL Classifications: A14, Z13, L00