No abstract

In these times of rapidly increasing energy prices many companies and households are questioning why these prices are so high, what are the reasons. The aim of the paper is to investigate the possible reasons of the increased electricity prices based on the reported information in the financial statements of the selected electricity supplier companies in the Czech Republic. Methodology is based on data collection from the relevant legal and other sources and the published annual reports of 7 selected companies. The price of electricity production is based mainly on the price of natural gas, coal and the CO2 emission allowances.The reported reasons for the increase of the prices of these commodities are mainly the EU regulation on CO2 emissions, covid and the energy crisis anticipation related to the war conflict. The prices of electricity for the end customer such as households or industries consists of a regulated component (such as a distribution fee) and an unregulated component (prices from the electricity supplier). The government of the Czech Republic introduced a cap on the unregulated component of the electricity prices for 2023 to help the end customers.

The article focuses on the evaluation of the sustainability of the public debt of the Czech Republic based on its development since 1995 and a comparison with other countries of the Visegrad Group, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Using a forecast based on an econometric model in the Gretl software, the development of the public debt until 2024 is outlined. The rate of growth of the Czech public debt has been growing for a long time, but there is still a relatively large reserve for the convergence criteria of the European Union.However, if the development of the share of public debt in the gross domestic product were to increase in the long term, it would indicate that the Czech Republic lives in higher standards than the economy allows. At the same time, the structure of the Czech public debt can be considered satisfactory, as the majority of the debt is made up of domestic residents.