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The article presents the concept of human development & its measurement using the Human Development Index (HDI). The first three parts explain the evolution of the human development concept & the methodology of the HDI & provide some analysis of HDI results. The focus of the article is to critically discuss the HDI as a measure of human development. Based on critical perspectives of selected authors, the article analyses the weak points (and by implication the strong ones as well) of the HDI, & it also discusses proposed changes in the HDI methodology. The combination of relative comprehensiveness of the scope of the indicator & relative simplicity of its methodology made the HDI more popular than its creators may have expected. Despite all the critical comments on the HDI, it may be used as a summary measure of development. However, it should be noted that it may serve only as a rough measure. Adapted from the source document.

Every country in the world is currently trying to reduce opportunities for corruption in the country. Fighting corruption is very challenging and difficult. The corruption occurs primarily in the public sector, where the object of interest is funding from public sources. Corruption has a negative impact primarily on the economy of the state in terms of their current, but also potential investors and strategic partners in the area of production. Second, it can not ignore the negative impact on the society, respectively citizens of the state affected by corruption. The paper aims to quantify the interdependence between the Corruption perception index and selected indicators of economic health in selected countries of the European Union. In terms of proven relationship between defined variables can then infer the interdependence of achieved Corruption perception index value in selected EU countries and to determine whether are these states in the problem unified or differentiated.

The article is concerned with voting indicators in the European Union. The first chapter constructs a model of voting power & defines four indicators: A. Simple relative power, B. Shapley-Shubik index, C. Banzhaf index, D. Coleman index. The second chapter defines data: the voting structure according the Nice Treaty & nine algorithms -- variants of the EU enlargement. The third chapter summarizes empirical results. The fourth chapter discusses statistical relations between voting indicators. The fifth chapter brings conclusions. 11 Tables, 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

The field of development studies witnessed an important debate between post-development critics and their opponents. The article presents this debate and focuses on neopopulism in post-development, or more particularly on romanticization, essentialization, the rejection of modern technologies and cultural relativism. It discusses the problem of the homogenization of the development discourse, practice and agency in 'development'. It reacts to the criticism from the field of practice that post-development aims at the old fashioned development discourse instead of focusing on the current discourse on globalization and that it ignores changes within 'development'. And finally, the article deals with the political orientation of post-development, its alleged affinity with neoliberalism, the way it uses statistical indicators and its normativity. The conclusion answers the questions whether post-development is meaningful and whether it can remain an important approach under the light of this debate. Adapted from the source document.

The goal of this contribution is to evaluate the relevance of the institutional factors and the influence of the single variables on the corruption. The key task is to find not only suitable indicator of the amount of corruption but also suitable approximants of institutional characteristics, else economical characteristics. The important advantage of this article is its focus also on the corruption measured by alternative ways, compared to the often used CPI. From the institutional characteristic view for the corruption fight seems to be important stable legal background. Not less important is also the government stability and its accountability. In the contradiction with the expected hypotheses claiming the strong and resistant bureaucracy to be beneficial against the corruption fight, almost all executed analysis is based on the contra productivity of the bureaucracy independency on the corruption fight. It is also important to mention that the direct and indirect taxes vary with their influence on the corruption. Adapted from the source document.

The article deals with the theoretical issues of macroprudential policy, shift of monetary policy paradigm towards application of so called 'leaning against the wind' strategy and mutual cooperation of these policies, which are both aimed at maintaining financial stability. For detection of financial instability are mainly used early warning indicators, which are most often based on the credit activity of the economy and asset prices development. In the second part, we examine the impact of the credit activity in the Czech Republic on the prices of particular assets and its subsequent effect on the consumer price index. Adapted from the source document.

The article aims to review the political developments in African states throughout their recent post-colonial past. Uprooting political violence & anchoring a stable structure based on a society-wide consensus being just two of the several prerequisites for solving so many other problems which trouble Africa today, this article aims to diagnose at least some root causes & consequences of the generally unsatisfactory political situation on the continent. Having identified a set of political instability symptoms (coups d'etat, civil wars, failed putches etc.) the author first ranks African states according to their political instability rate. On the basis of statistical correlation analysis, the author then investigates the relation between political instability in Africa & a number of quantifiable geographical, demographical, military & economic variables. The author has identified some dispositions increasing -- though with only small statistical significance -- the probability of instability in African states. In order of importance, these include: large territory, high illiteracy rate, low urbanization, high number of ethnic groups living within the territory, & large population. Also, there is a close link between political instability & governmental military spending. It probably has a negative impact on a number of key economic indicators, be it GDP growth, GDP per capita levels, domestic savings, or price level developments. In the final part of his article, the author makes a brief summary of political developments in African countries in the 21st century. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The publication output of all political science and international relations departments and their individual scholars in the Czech Republic is analyzed and ranked here using publication indicators from the Web of Science and Scopus citation databases. Both individual and departmental rankings are constructed based on a composite measure of publication activity which incorporates three indicators: the sum of author shares (in order to account for each authors contribution in the case of co-authored articles) of articles registered in either database, the number of citations of these articles, and the impact factor of the journal. The departmental rankings are further weighted by the size of a given department. The analysis takes into account all departments with an active undergraduate or graduate program in political science or international relations (a total of 14), and all researchers with an institutional affiliation to these departments. The original dataset used for this analysis was compiled from both citation databases and validated by information from the internet presentations of the departments and by sending a questionnaire to the heads of all the departments. The results suggest a weak overall performance of Czech political science in terms of the used publication indicators. However, the analysis of recent trends shows a significant increase in overall Czech publication activity since 2006. Both this trend and the emergence of scholars with consistent publication activity registered in the citation databases constitute a positive development and allow for optimism in the near future. Adapted from the source document.

This article maps state visits by the presidents of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Austria between 2004 and 2010. It has two goals. First, the article describes and compares the structure of the five presidents' state visits according to the countries and regions visited and according to the type of visit (official, working, or multilateral visit). Second, data about the state visits of the heads of states are utilized as an indicator of the geopolitical orientation of the respective state. All five countries under study show strong geopolitical orientation towards Western Europe, especially Germany. Nevertheless, our data also show certain differences in geopolitical priorities. Poland stands out with its extraordinarily strong orientation towards Eastern and Northern Europe (the Baltics). The Czech Republic is characterised by a relatively stronger preference for the transatlantic relationship. Our data also show that Hungary is to a certain degree isolated as it is not a favoured destination for presidential visits. Adapted from the source document.

Financial stress indexes provide a new tool for regulatory and public institutions, which participate in the supervision of financial markets and in the monitoring of the development of risk in financial markets. Our paper introduced a number of methods of building the financial stress index for the Czech Republic and Hungary. We have developed our indices based on the variables representing the level of financial stress by the movement of market prices of assets, which provides a higher frequency to the measurement of financial stress in the main sectors of financial system, ie. banking, money market, currency, fixed income and equity sectors. We have than evaluated our indices by the effectiveness to identify periods of increased financial stress based on the deviation by one standard deviation of the value of the index from the median value. Comparing periods identified with this method with historical periods of increased financial stress, we came to the conclusion that my financial stress index for each country successfully identifies the development and level of stress in financial system. Adapted from the source document.

Economic growth of the Czech Republic measured by GDP reached 3,4% per annum in the decade 2001-2010 and was substantially faster than average annual growth of the European Union. Strong acceleration in the years 2005-2007 was followed by stagnation in the years 2008-2012 caused by strong decline of GDP in the year 2009 and milder recession in the year 2012. The modest recovery in the years 2010 and 2011 was pulled namely by foreign trade, while final consumption and gross fixed capital formation stagnated. Alternative indicator of national income was negatively influenced by growing outflow of primary incomes. Real gross domestic income indicates different results in comparison with gross domestic product because of changes in the terms of trade. Macroeconomic stability improved substantially in the field of foreign trade while general government deficit contributed to its deterioration. Adapted from the source document.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of political instability on inflow of foreign direct investments (FDI) in transition economies (CEE, Balkan and Post-Soviet countries). Regarding standard indexes of political instability, there is a shortage of data within the selected sample of countries. Therefore, we propose alternative proxies for political instability. Furthermore, we distinguish between two types of political instability being omitted in thematic literature: elite (minority or weak governments) and non-elite (violent protests, civil wars, coups). The paper provides two-step empirical analysis: correlation analysis and regression models using standard OLS. Both analyses compare the effect of selected proxies for political instability on inflow of FDI and FDI per capita. In summary, it is not possible to prove the effect of political instability on inflow of FDI in transition countries in unambiguous way. Despite it, a few statistically significant variables seem to be perspective for future research; subindex Political Stability within Governance Matters by the Word Bank and Group Grievance within Failed State Index by the Fund for Peace (non-elite); Herfindahl Index Government and a dummy for (non)presence of parliament election (elite).