No abstract

The paper focuses on the role of consumer confidence and selected well-being measures in aggregate consumption and in subsets of aggregate consumption on a broad set of 22 OECD countries. Consumer confidence played a positive and statistically significant role in the development of expenditures especially on durable and semi-durable goods and services. The increase in cognitive, affective and eudaimonic measures of well-being, measured by the Cantril ladder, positive and negative affect and freedom to make life choices variables, had negative impact on total consumption and expenditures on semi-durable goods and services. Possible explanations for these estimates are provided in the paper. Based on the purpose of expenditure, consumer confidence was a significant determinant of all expenditures except for unavoidable spending such as food, health, housing, water, energy, and fuel. The subjective well-being indicators showed a negative impact on expenditures on clothing and footwear, recreation and culture, and restaurants and hotels. Possible explanations for the positive and negative effects of subjective well-being measures on consumption, benefits of including the freedom of choice variable, and directions for future research regarding the introduction of understudied variables are discussed.

While there are typically plenty of estimates of structural unemployment rate for an economy as a whole, the analysis of this phenomenon at the regional level is rather sparse. Of course, the task is quite different as the concept of structural unemployment as an image of the medium-run or long-run equilibrium of the economy does not need to hold at a regional level. This paper proposes an econometrical approach based on the search theory of the labor market. The generalized method of moments is employed to estimate the so-called stationarized unemployment rates in the fourteen regions of the Czech economy. By comparing the estimates and actually observed levels of unemployment rates, the effects of economic upswings and recessions after the year 2000 may be analyzed. Indeed, from the regional perspective the economic impacts differ substantially in certain periods of time.

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the relationship between economic performance and competitiveness indicators to address the question of the extent to which competitiveness indicators provideuseful information when assessing economic performance. The analysis was performed on various examples of African economies. The possible relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators were examined by extending a basic relationship between economic performance per capita and investment by competitiveness indicators. The models were estimated by means of an Arellano-Bond estimator. The authors detected many statistically significant relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators in the cases of both the whole sample and specifically middle-income economies. However, in the case of low-income economies there are no discernible relationships between economic performance and the information included in the competitiveness indicators. The paper contributes to the analysis of the economic performance of African economies, for which the empirical evaluation of possible links between economic performance and competitiveness indicators is altogether missing.

Abstract:The paper presents both the theoretical account of the issue of foreign exchange risk premium and the actual estimates of the time-varying risk premium for the cases of the Czech koruna to euro and US dollar. The risk premium is modelled within a state space framework and estimated using the Kalman fi ltering procedure. Some fi nancial market fundamentals are used to estimate the risk premium, and thus not only do the estimates give insight into the foreign exchange market behaviour but also into some linkages between the various segments of the fi nancial market as a whole.