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The chapter presents a short overview of the most relevant issues of local government's existence in the last 30 years in the Czech Republic. During this period, the Czech Republic has implemented reform of public administration in favour of greater decentralisation for local governments: increasing their responsibilities, creation of a new local government level-regions. The Czech Republic is one of the countries in the EU with the smallest average size of the municipality expressed in terms of population. This affects the pattern of local government financing and efficiency of local administration in general. The combination of small population size, small volume of the budget, lack of qualified staff, and incompetent decisions of the municipality representatives may lead to serious problems of indebtedness. To avoid this, central governments monitor municipal debt by various set of indicators. Case studies presented in the chapter indicate that even adequate regulations and monitoring mechanism do not ensure risk of municipal indebtedness.

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The enormous increase in the number of students of higher education and transition from elite to mass and universal higher education are worldwide trends in recent years and further expansion is expected in the coming years. This situation, however, raises the need for higher expenditure on higher education and many countries have to deal with under-financing of their higher education. Involving or increasing student participation in funding is currently under discussion. From the point of view of financing are distinguished three basic higher education financing models in OECD countries which are characterized by none, smaller, or larger student co-financing. The aim of this paper is to choose appropriate indicators for describing quality of European higher education systems and with using cluster analysis to display similar higher education systems and discuss their funding. Findings of this paper indicate that models of higher education systems with multi-source funding achieve higher quality. However, there are other influences that affect the quality of higher education systems-contextual indicators, such as economic, demographic, or historical development.

Regional policies are paramount for the development of any country. These policies are formulated over the years in lieu of demands from the region and time concurrently.Initially, policies are focused on bridging disparities but recently targeting entrepreneurship and quality of life development. However, these policies are faced with various problems.The study aims at identifying the interrelationship between selected regional policy indicators in EU Visegrad four group of countries. Secondary data from the OECD on regional disparity, entrepreneurship, innovation, and quality of life indicators pertinent to the selected regions were used for the analysis. Data used for the analysis were from the years 2008, 2012, and 2016 with a four-year lag period. Correlation analysis was undertaken using the DisplayR software in this research. The research found that there is a continuous mixed relationship between Regional Disparity, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Quality of Life indicators with the Innovation variables showing highest positive correlations in the countries. Furthermore, the higher the disparities, the lower and the quality of life and vice versa, hence the regional disparity indicator poses a significant effect on the quality of life.