Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

Remittances represent one of the most important money flows into the devel-oping world comparable to, and often exceeding, earnings from exports of goods and services and foreign direct investments. Even though importance of remittances in poverty reduction has been documented, impact of remittances on economic growth remains under-investigated mainly due to a strong endogeneity of remittances with respect to both level and growth rates of GDP. We provide detailed look into this endogenous relationship and discuss possible instruments which can help to remedy this problem in IV-estimation. In order to establish a link between economic growth and remittances we use range of instrumental variables encompassing geographical, microeconomic-based and internal instruments. By interacting remittances with other determinants of economic growth we provide evidence that remittances are especially important source of growth in poor countries not because of low level of development per se, but because the effect of remittances on growth is stronger providing level of human capital and savings rate are low and financial markets are underdeveloped. Keywords: remittances, economic growth, instrumental variables; JEL Classification: F24, O47

To understand the evolution of labor demand in European countries in the context of automation and other emerging technologies, we apply the decomposition developed by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019) to European data. At the center of this framework is the task content of production – measuring the allocation of tasks to factors of production. By creating a displacement effect, automation shifts the task content of production against labor, while the introduction of new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage increases the labor demand via the reinstatement effect. Contrary to the US experience, in a group of 10 European countries, the displacement effect of automation was completely counterbalanced by technologies that create new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. Furthermore, our cross-country comparison reveals a substantial variation across countries. The cumulative change in the task content of production ranges from 6.2% in the United Kingdom to a strong negative effect, namely –7.6%, in Sweden. A part of the differences can be explained by the rate of adoption of industrial robots. We document a strong unconditional relationship between the change in robot density and the displacement effect. However, differences in the reinstatement effect remain unexplained. Keywords: automation, new technologies, labor demand, displacement effect, reinstatement effect; JEL Classification: J23, J24, O33

The aim of this paper is to estimate whether the liberalization process benefited a mutual trade between the EU and BRICS Members over the last two decades, and whether protectionism, which is currently on the rise, still represents a significant toll to trade. Our results proved that the multilateral trade liberalization process, represented by the WTO, is no longer benefiting trade among observed economies. It clearly confirms the long-standing stalemate in the WTO. We have also found that the observed FTA between the EU and South Africa created trade strongly, but unevenly. Finally, we found that the level of tariffs no longer represents a significant barrier to trade among observed countries Keywords: BRICS, European Union, international trade, gravity model, trade policy; JEL Classification: C33, F11, F13, F14, F41

In this paper we investigate the relationship between fiscal imbalances and long-term interest rates and assess various transmission channels of fiscal spillovers in EMU during 2002 – 2015. Our results support the importance of bilateral trade, informational and geographical channel of transmission, with spillovers accounting for more than 50 percent of the overall effect. Our findings suggest that if the share of public debt in GDP in all countries increases by 1 percentage point, the long-term interest rates of a given country will, on average, increase by 2.56 – 5.98 basis points, 1.9 – 3.61 basis points of which can be attributed to indirect effects. Keywords: public debt, long-term interest rates, EMU, spatial panel analysis, spillover effects; JEL Classification: C21, E43, E62, F42, F45, H60, O52

Measuring the efficiency of public higher education institutions has become a subject of many studies. We analyse these studies using meta-analysis and identify the most commonly adopted inputs and outputs in the DEA and SFA models (e.g. the number of students, graduates, academic staff). Data obtained from these studies were used for meta-regression analysis. We analyse the effect of independent variables (sample size, the number of inputs and outputs, method used, model orientations, returns to scale and to the country) on the average technical efficiency of public higher education institutions. Finally, we use this model to predict the average technical efficiency of the Czech and Slovak public higher education institutions. Keywords: efficiency, higher education, meta-analysis, regression, DEA, SFA; JEL Classification: C21, C67, I23