Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

This paper empirically verifies recent efforts of EU policymakers and government authorities to apply the European Cohesion Policy (ECP) as a possible counter-cyclical instrument to boost economies in their economic downturns. Compared to limited country-specific studies, we allow for an endogeneity issue between the business cycles and the ECP payments and apply a system GMM estimation for the EU-28 recipient countries sample in the time period 2000 – 2018. Even though the overall ECP payments follow a pro-cyclical path, the model estimations for the sub-periods based on individual programming periods reveal a time-varying cyclical character of the ECP. Whereas the observed pro-cyclicality can be mainly contributed to the period 2000 – 2006, we find the conditional counter-cyclical effects in 2007 – 2013 and 2014 – 2018, when a lower price level and obeying the rule of law seem to have an extra counter-cyclical dimension, confirming a rationale of the convergence criteria and the Stability and the Growth Pact.

The publication The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report encompasses the latest data on the travel and tourism competitiveness. Given that this report is a leading product of the World Economic Forum platform, it serves as a strategic benchmark for future policy implementation. Natural and cultural resources are significant in explaining tourism competitiveness. The empirical study in this paper is based on the two-step process of measuring convergence of tourism competitiveness. The first step illustrates the values of competitiveness of natural and cultural resources for two groups of European countries: the Balkans and Eastern Europe and five high-ranking European countries in the field of cultural tourism. The second part applies the entropy method for measuring convergence of competitiveness of this group of countries. For analyzing tourism competitiveness in these two groups of countries, ten indicators were used: five for natural resources and five for cultural resources. The results show that natural and cultural resources are the critical drivers of competitiveness and represent the determinants of tourism performance in the future.

Global income inequality becomes one of the severe problems in most economies, while government spending financed by public debt can be a good instrument of fiscal policy to reduce this inequality in society. Does institutional quality affect the public debt – income inequality relationship in advanced economies? For the answer, the paper employs the system-GMM and PMG estimator to examine the effects of public debt, institutional quality, and their interaction on income inequality for a group of 30 advanced economies from 2002 through 2020. The paper finds some exciting results. Public debt and institutional quality narrow income inequality, but their interaction term widens. Furthermore, economic growth and unemployment increase income inequality, while education decreases it. The findings suggest some necessary policy implications to narrow income inequality through public debt and institutional quality.

We analyze the influence of sanctions on bilateral trade flows between the European Union and the Russian Federation during 2015 – 2019. Despite trade sanctions and counter-sanctions being imposed against particular groups of commodities, their influence affected trade flows between Russia and the EU in all sectors. The proposed methodology of estimating the effect of sanctions on EU-Russia trade is based on the idea of calculating trade potentials and comparing them with actual values. The augmented gravity approach is used to construct an econometric model, while the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood method is applied to derive unbiased estimates. It is shown that during 2015 – 2019, due to EU sanctions Russia lost USD 41.3 billion in export revenues annually, comprising 2.5 percent of its GDP. Russian exports to Europe declined in all basic industries, but the petroleum industry took 91.2 percent of the total losses. European aggregate exports to Russia have not suffered from mutual sanctions: although the European food industry lost USD 2.7 billion annually, these losses were compensated for by export growth in other industries.

The main aim of the paper is to identify the determinants of strategic development in e-commerce and evaluate their importance on the whole process of strategic management. A research evaluating the importance of determinants is carried out using the online questionnaire survey with enterprises in e-commerce. The paper focuses on research sample consisting 188 SMEs and 21 large enterprises in e-commerce. Selected methods of statistical induction and descriptive statistics were used for verification of the research hypotheses. The research has shown that e-commerce enterprises primarily attribute a varying importance to individual determinants in the process of strategic management. The results show enterprises primarily underestimate the following determinants of strategic development in e-commerce: mission and vision, strategic situational analysis, strategic control, corporate culture, personnel management and strategy, financial management and strategy, ability to work with legislation. E-commerce enterprises do not apply a comprehensive approach in the process of strategic management in the Czech environment in e-commerce.