The aim of this work is to develop a “learning model” which outranks countries according to their confrontation of historical macroeconomic indicators for a given period of time with the spreads at the end of that time and to formulate a forward-looking investment strategy regarding government bonds for the following time period. The mechanism of identifying investment opportunities among government bonds is based on the multiple criteria decision making technique, and we look to the Promethee II method as a symmetry approach to country ordering. The spread is defined as the difference between the yield to maturity of the 10-year government bond of a country and the Germany government bond with the same maturity. In this paper, an optimization approach based on three models is developed to find the weights of importance for macroeconomic characteristics, together with a sensitivity analysis on changes in these characteristics. The method was applied to 17 European countries characterized by 16 macroeconomic characteristics. The originality of this paper lies in the two-stage approach to the investment strategy construction based on criteria weights optimization with stability intervals for their values.

In the paper, the static computable general equilibrium model for Slovakia and Slovenia is used for a tax burden analysis. There was considered simultaneous 1% increase in taxes on primary factors, on firms’ and government domestic and imported purchases, on import taxes, on output (or income) tax, on private domestic and imported consumption taxes and export subsidies. The direct tax burden as well as the allocative efficiency effects of a tax, the welfare effects and welfare decomposition of such change for both countries is analysed. The most sensitive sectors on tax rate changes is heavy manufacturing and processed food and the most distorting effect has the tax increase on private consumption tax. The government’s tax increase should generate return at least 105.75% of its costs in Slovakia and 101.92% in Slovenia, otherwise the welfare will decline.

The paper presents applications of portfolio techniques including proposed modification of the Black-Litterman approach for pension funds' performance evaluation on the Slovak private pension funds markets and deals with: how effective are the investment strategies of companies on the market of specific pension funds; if the investment strategies outcomes match the companies' officially declared fund strategy type in a risk-return space; and if the legislative changes on the pension market segment impact those funds strategies. Relative positions of single funds are identified by constructing efficient frontiers in various spaces. As a result, the investment strategies create clusters for conservative, balanced, and index funds, while the growth funds have higher strategies variance. It is shown that the legislative changes concerning mainly more risky funds have an important influence on the second pillar growth funds investment strategies. The results show high interactions between legislative changes and investment decisions.

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