Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

Eighty five European NUTS 2 regions of 6 European countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are considered in the paper. Attention is focused on the assessment of their competitiveness. Data were obtained from the Statistical Office of the European Communities. Four indicators of competitiveness (i.e. quality of labour forces and innovations, labour market, economic activity and infrastructure) were determined by means of factor analysis. The factor scores of indicated factors in the regions were divided into groups by means of multivariate classification techniques (cluster analysis and classification trees). The outcome of the analysis is the classification of groups of regions with similar competitiveness factors.

Important tools of the current environmental policy are economic (market) instruments – i.e. fees, taxes and tradable permits. However, the design of such instruments should be done in a way to enable the evaluation of their environ-mental efficiency and economic effectiveness. The evaluation is rarely done in post-communist countries, where market instruments have a short history. The paper introduce the 3E method of the evaluation used by OECD and shows the results gained for the market instrument used in the Czech Republic with the focus on air pollution fees.

The paper analyses the status and importance of natural gas for the overall de-velopment of the world economy with application to the EU. It acknowledges that rapid depletion of all other energy sources represents a significant alterna-tive, the disposable reserves of which might considerably contribute to satisfacion of energy needs in the EU. Authors examine major features determining economic utility of gas: structure and volume of extraction and consumption, specificities of its sales and pricing policy. They emphasize idiosyncrasies in crude oil trading as well as its ever stronger position in energy and heat production while regarding coordination of energy policy and strengthening the nego-tiating potential vis-à-vis major natural gas suppliers as the most effective way of satisfying the Union’s energy needs.

The aim of this paper is to assess the expected socio-economic impacts of various scenarios of pandemic influenza mitigation on the economy and mortality for Slovakia. Compared to similar past studies (e.g. Van Genugten et al. (2003)), our approach bears a significant difference. Whereas those studies work from the very beginning with the expected values of the data, we have treated the data as well as the model parameters as random variables. Results in the form of probability distributions and their characteristics (expected values and tolerance intervals) were obtained by stochastic Monte Carlo simulations of random impacts on 5,400,000 inhabitants of Slovakia. Six scenarios of pandemia mitigation have been analyzed. Total costs of medical treatment, the number of casualties as well as social costs with casualties included were compared.

Research on national innovation system has increased noticeably in recent years. However, while some literature is available on technology management, little information is available on social capital. Similarly, the study on social capital has been mounting steadily, but little work is available on national innovation system. Thus, this work used the reports of World Bank and World Value Survey, applying the linear structural relation model to consider this relationship between the social capital and national innovation system. Overall, the results found that the innovation seem a collective achievement embedded with other social activities, and that the social capital like a catalyzer helps the collective innovation and economic productivity. Thus, this work suggests that every country should recognize that economy was closely embedded with social structure, and that should enrich the social capital to improve the performance of national innovation system and economic productivity.