Search results

The paper is concerned with the economic theory of George Stigler. First part outlines the life of George Stigler. Second part examines his dissertation "Production and Distribution Theories" (1941). Third part discusses his textbook "The Theory of Price" (1946). Fourth part is devoted to his "Essays in the History of Economics" (1965). Fifth part analyzes the work "The Organization of Industry" (1968). Sixth part explains "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (1971). Seventh part discusses Stigler's book "The Citizen and the State" (1975). Eighth part presents his autobiography "Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist" (1988). Stigler has become famous thanks to articles "Economics of Information" (1961) and "Theory of Economic Regulation" (1971), which says that interest groups and other political participants will use the regulatory and coercive powers of government to shape laws and regulations in a way that is beneficial to them. Adapted from the source document.

The publication analyses and discusses legal and financial tools, including international strategies and policies, relevant to the protection of landscape character with a focus on agricultural impact in the Czech Republic. The first section summarises the available Czech literature on the subject and includes an analysis of the changes in scale of Czech farms after 1989. The second section summarises relevant financial instruments and their influence on landscape character. In the third section, a more detailed analysis of selected tools is attempted, including several case studies describing their use and impacts in practice. Section four summarises relevant international agreements, strategies, policies, and national and regional government programmes, and discusses their influence on landscape character in the Czech Republic. In the fifth section, policy changes on a national, international, and regional level favourable to landscape character are suggested. The summary in section six offers some general comments, including a plea for more effective control mechanisms and for more complex policies and strategies integrating small-scale rural renewable energy production with water and landscape character conservation and sustainable agricultural production based on local economic and biological loops

The article analyses the evolution of the Slovak political party "Smer" (Direction) and its position in the party system of Slovak Republic. The article focuses on the shift of the party program from the "Centrist Populism" towards "Social Democracy." According to the first program documents the Party of "Smer" (Direction) was designed as pragmatic, non-ideological party. In the persistent conflict between authoritarianism vs. democracy "Smer" identified itself as the pro-democratic and pro-market force. Party policy before 2002 contained only few social democratic components; it was closer to the conservative or right-wing populist parties. After the parliamentary election 2002 and the failure of non-communist left "Smer" decided to become a member of the Socialist International (SI) and Party of European Socialists (PES). The process of the institutional approach to the international Social Democratic Party structures was accompanied by the substantial changes in the social and economic program of the party. The process was completed on the institutional level in May 2005, when Smer joined both SI and PES, and on the level of political program on the Party Congress in December 2005. In the process of so called "socialdemocratisation" of "Smer" the international factor played crucial role, especially the need to have an international partner in the European Parliament. "Smer" met the standards of the Social Democratic identity only in the social and economic affairs. The other five dimensions - environmental policy, participative democracy, cultural and human-rights dimension, supra-national dimension and the dimension of equality and freedom "Smer" met only partially or not at all, so these process remains unfinished. According to some political declarations "Smer" remains the populist party and the uncompromising critic of the right-wing government of Mikuláš Dzurinda, on the other side the official documents of the party anticipate only the moderate corrections of the economical and social reforms, ...

After the First World War an anti-alcohol movement requiring the prohibition intensified both in Europe and the USA and it also resonated strongly in the Czechoslovakia. The main representative of this movement was the Czechoslovak Teetotal Union. It struggled for eradication of alcoholism as a serious social and health problem. The activities of the movement were in conflict with the interests of groups of alcoholic drinks producers and distributors, which represented a strong lobby connected to political circles, especially the most powerful political party, the Agrarian Party. Financially strong alcohol lobby with one exception (Holitscher Act of 1922 restricting access to alcohol for the youth) quite successfully neutralized the attempts of the anti-alcohol movement to gain a bigger state support in the fight against alcoholism. Only after the methyl-alcohol scandal in 1935 the government did establish a permanent advisory board for the fight against alcoholism in the Ministry of Public Health and Physical Education. It elaborated a many recommendations (such as blood tests for drivers after car accidents), which, however, were not implemented until the end of the First Republic. An important benefit of the Czechoslovak Teetotal Union was the founding of alcohol treatment counselling.

Violent conflict is very old in human society. The development of military technology brought with itself the worst tragedies loss of human live and material devastation in the second half of 20th century in the Horn of Africa. This region is one of the centers of various political violent conflicts in the world, according to length of these violent conflicts, the number of death of people, mainly civilian, refugees and internal displaced persons (IDP). This study elucidates the root causes of long wars in the Horn of Africa focusing mainly on South Sudan and Somalia. It also illustrates how the Super Powers during the Cold War helped their client states to prolong the suffering of people in the region. When Socialist system disappeared from Eastern Europe, Mengistu Haile Mariam's and Siyad Barre's regime ignominiously collapsed. In Ethiopia Amhara power elite, who ruled the Empire state from 1889 to 1991 lost their state power and Tigrian guerrilla fighters captured it through the power of the gun, Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia, South Sudan is emerging from long heinous war to independence. The violent conflict in Somalia transformed after the old regime demise in 1991 and the new leaders unable to build new central government. Somalia is fragmented and became the good example of failed state in the theory of contemporary political sociology. The paper tries to explain these complex violent conflicts in this part of Africa.