The paper explores (former) transition economies, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Republic of Serbia, concerning abandonment of the exchange rate targeting and fixed exchange rate regimes and movement toward explicit/implicit inflation targeting and flexible exchange rate regimes. The paper identifies different subperiods concerning crucial monetary and exchange rate regimes, and tracks the changes of specific monetary transmission channels i.e. exchange rate channel, interest rate channel, indirect and direct influences to the exchange rate, with variance decomposition of VAR/VEC model. The empirical results indicate that Polish monetary strategy toward higher monetary and exchange rate flexibility has been performed smoothly, gradually and planned, compared to the Slovak and, especially, Czech case. The comparison of three former transition economies with the Serbian case indicate strong and persistent exchange rate pass-through, low interest rate pass-through, significant indirect and direct influence to the exchange rate as potential obstacles for successful inflation targeting in the Republic of Serbia

The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the effects of changes in quality of economic, legal and political institutions on income inequality in the advanced countries over the last two decades. Using the robust panel model on a sample of 21 OECD countries, it is found that the impact of elitization of society is more pronounced than the impact of unionization on income redistribution, but both effects are less expressed in comparison to the influence of institutional changes on redistribution. In a globalized economy, insufficient redistribution and high inequality might be interpreted as the consequence of institutional inertia to disruptive technological and business changes.

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The aim of this paper is to determine whether, and to what extent, the migrations from the EU-8+2 to the EU-15 were motivated by differences in earnings and productivity and to what extent by differences in welfare state generosity during the period of the transitional arrangements. On these grounds, a distinction emerges between "favourable" and "unfavourable" migrations on one hand and immigration net winners and losers on the other hand. The obtained results represent an empirical ground for the discussion on the thesis according to which more generous welfare state regimes will be more susceptible to the influx of unfavourable immigrants during the upcoming period of the free movement of labour, while the less generous welfare state regimes will be a magnet for the favourable immigration influx within the EU-27.

In the aftermath of the global recession, the need for fiscal consolidation in order to reduce budget deficits and the public debt has intensified, but with the aim to make the measures applied not affect the further slowdown of the economic activity in the European Union (EU) economies. In this paper, the episodes of the fiscal consolidation in the period from 1990 to 2015 in the 28 EU economies are analyzed, differentiating the multiyear episodes against the one-year (i.e. cold shower) episodes and their effects before and after the global recession. The episodes of the fiscal consolidation that result in successful (a reduction in the cyclically-adjusted primary budget deficit) and expansionary effects (the GDP growth) are identified, thus empirically confirming the existence of non-Keynesian effects. The stated affirms the idea that the achievement of fiscal sustainability by using austerity measures does not necessarily imply contractions in economies and that the development of a fiscal architecture in the EU by establishing complementarity between the national and supranational fiscal rules is of extraordinary importance in the post-crisis period.