Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

After joining the European Union the Czech Republic should respond positively to the challenges of the Lisbon Strategy, and start to build prerequisites for a knowledge-based economy. It should actively participate in building the new knowledge society in Europe as envisaged by the Lisbon European Council in 2000 in the Lisbon Strategy. The paper brings about arguments that the Czech Republic should deliberately undergo the second transformation leading to the knowledge-based economy. To underpin the arguments selected structural data describing characteristics of education, science and research and development in Finland and the Czech Republic are used. In conclusions needed reforms and policy changes are briefly discussed. Keywords: knowledge-based economy, Lisabon strategy, transformation, Czech economy, Finish economy, education, scientific research and development JEL Classification: F02, O30, P20

This paper presents the results from two methodological approaches to the analysis of performance and risk of private pension funds in the Slovak Republic. In the first approach, the problem is formulated as a multiple criteria decision model, and Promethee methodology is used for outranking the pension funds. The second approach uses modern portfolio theory to analyze pension funds in a risk-return space, and presents results of the analysis of the efficiency on the private pension funds market in the Slovak Republic. Modern portfolio theory is used to construct efficient frontiers in selected risk-return spaces, using mean-CVaR and mean-standard deviation. The Black-Litterman approach is used to overcome a problem of sensitivity to small changes in inputs in mean-variance portfolio optimization. Keywords: pension funds, Promethee outranking, efficient frontiers, Black-Litterman portfolio optimization JEL Classification: C61, G11

The article focuses on Milton Friedman’s contribution to the economic science. Milton Friedman belongs to the outstanding economists of the past century, he was one of the founders of the Chicago School, the symbol of monetarism and the leader of the contemporary economic liberalism. Milton Friedman considered free market as the most efficient form for the economy. His contribution to the economic science development is extraordinary. It concerns not only the pure theory and methodology of economic analysis but also empirical analysis, economic policy and the area of basic issues on comparative economic sys-tems. The core of Friedman’s input to the pure economic theory is first of all his monetary theory – the money-demand and money-supply conceptions, inflation, as well as the mutual relations between inflation and unemployment. Keywords: Milton Friedman, the Chicago School, monetarism, liberalism, market, money demand, money supply, money rule, the Phillips curve, consumption function, permanent income JEL Classification: B41, E13, E31, E41, E42, E51

The objective of this essay is to focus attention on the need of developing a broader framework for economics because of rising worldwide awareness towards the increasing and novel roles of knowledge, science and their societal and economical impact on the 21st century. Comparing with formation of economics of industrial society the author puts underlines the need of developing an economy that fits more for global knowledge-based society. The author shows how to elaborate explicit theory of contemporary socio-economic reality. The author summarizes in this essay crucial movements in economy and society on the path from industrial to knowledge age of global society as arguments for innovating an economy.

This paper concentrates on whether research in economics is more qualitative nowadays, and asks for use of additional qualitative methods, not only in the entire respective field of investigation, but also in the field of forecasting. The second step in developing this idea is enumeration of different qualitative ap-proaches, which are typical for forecasting including methods resulting from those approaches. Keywords: development strategy, globalization and regionalization, qualitative methods, quantitative methods, systematic approach, participative approach, scenarios JEL Classification: D80, O15, O21

The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has gone through different stages until arriving at the creation of the euro. Now the new ten member states of the European Union (EU) are in the process of trying to close policies in order to meet the macroeconomic criteria of Maastricht. An overview on exchange rate policy of those countries will be analyzed in this paper. Most of the new member states have pegged their currencies to the euro and are trying to join with it as soon as possible. Nevertheless, others are still highly linked with currencies of the international monetary system or their exchange rate policy is still far from meeting the objective of the exchange rate a short-term period of time. Keywords: exchange rate policy, European Monetary Union, euro, enlargement of European Union, ERM II JEL Classification: F33, F36