Abstract:Foreign direct investment has become an important factor of development of economies in the last decades. However, its economic nature as well as its relationship with corruption has not yet been clarifi ed in economic literature. Following previous theoretical research, mainly Dunning's eclectic model, this paper evaluates the econo metric relationship between corruption and foreign direct investment by testing three theoretically-based hypo theses: that corruption perception indicator is a stationary variable, that the relationship between corruption and foreign direct investment stock is statistically weak and that changes in foreign direct investment stock do not Granger cause changes in corruption. The verifi cation is based on unit root tests, panel co-integration and Granger causality models performed on data from the Transparency International, the World Bank and the Heritage Foundation and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) for 94 countries for the years 1998-2007. The results show that there is no signifi cant relationship between the two variables.

This paper aims to theoretically derive and afterwards econometrically assess the impact of intellectual property protection (IPP) on national economies. The authors' main hypothesis is that by creating a form of non-market protection, IPP limits free competition and has no positive effects on national economies and the world economy in general. The hypothesis is tested through estimation of relationship between charges for the use of intellectual property and 1) gross domestic product, 2) GDP growth, 3) unemployment, 4) exports of high-tech products, 5) FDI outflow, and 6) expenses on research and development in a panel dataset of 146 countries in years 2005-2014 based Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panel models. The data tells us that changes in these charges have not a significant impact on the studied indicators, which counts against claims of positive impact of IPP on economies and growth.

Abstract:The paper examines development of economic balance and effi ciency of monetary and fi scal policy in the Czech Republic and Slovakia during the crisis with the help of empirical verifi cation of Robert Mundell's model of effective market classifi cation. Our main fi ndings show that although there was no direct 'loser' during the crisis, the Czech Republic seemed to have better coped with its economic imbalances due to the independence of its monetary policy. Slovakia, on the contrary, has preserved several problems on the side of external balance. However, as both countries show certain differences, it is impossible to assess whether the euro adoption had the same effect on both of them. In general, the paper contributes to the research on the Czech and Slovak economy and euro area membership.

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Mancur Olson wrote his influential study Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Countries are Rich, and Others Poor in 1996. In his paper, Olson claimed that the differences in economic development between countries are caused by only two factors: institutions and policies on the one hand and culture on the other. We attempt to test his conjecture using econometric modelling, combining and comparing it with a broadly defined orthodox production function in an indirect neoclassical notation (Solow-Minhas-Arrow-Chenery's SMAC framework). The "pseudo-production function" obtained is econometrically sound and of explanatory power similar to models including economic variables, although we find strong evidence of interdependence between capital-labour share and institutions and policies and culture. We consider the test, performed on panel data from 154 countries over five-year averages from 1980-2014, to be robust and consistent with Olson's ideas.