Suchergebnisse

There is a wide range of theories that try to explain interactions between politics end economy that are referred as political cycles. Majority of these theories aims at analysis of changes in economic outcomes that are related to elections or other phenomena in the political reality. To induce at least some of these changes it is necessary to alter a country's legislation which leads to emergence of political legislation cycles - changes in legislation activity over time in an electoral term. The aim of this paper is to study political legislation cycle in the legislative system of the Czech Republic. Obtained results suggest that elections timing has an impact on legislation activity. As electoral term matures and upcoming elections are getting closer an increase is observed in the legislation activity.

This paper analyzes political pressure on the National Bank of Slovakia, using the Havrilesky (1993) methodology based on media signalling. This methodology allows the pressure on the Central Bank of Slovakia to be compared with the pressure on the central banks to which the methodology was already applied, namely - the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Czech National Bank. The analysis and the comparison reveals a relatively weak signalling of pressure in media in Slovakia and prevailance of financial sector representatives as the main commentaries on monetary policy of the National Bank of Slovakia in the period before euro adoption.

We evaluate proposals for independent fiscal authority put forward as a solution to excessive public spending. Our main conclusion is that moving the responsibility to set broad measures of fiscal policy from the hands of government to an independent fiscal council is not necessarily welfare improving. We show that the change is welfare improving if nature of uncertainty between fiscal and monetary policymakers does not change as a result. However, if this institutional change involves considerable decrease of capacity of the new agency to recognize economic shocks, citizens' welfare can decrease as a results. This is especially significant in times of increased economic volatility such as in a recent global financial crisis. Faced with the ambiguous theoretical result, we try to gain deeper insight by calibrating our simple model.

This article discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation‐targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. We find some evidence that the interventions had a statistically significant, but short lived and economically not very important, impact on the koruna's exchange rate and its volatility. We also discuss consistency of the interventions with the inflation‐targeting framework. All the Czech intervention episodes are judged to be consistent with the inflation targets and output developments, but for two episodes not fully consistent regarding the mix of monetary conditions. (JEL E42, E44, E52, E58, E65, F31)

N/A