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Economic Well-Being Beyond GDP: Implementing the Recommendations of the Commission on the Measure of Economic Performance and Social Progress
Burton, Liam ; Paulus, Michal (advisor) ; Baxa, Jaromír (referee)
Gross Domestic Product has historically been the dominant, often sole, yardstick regarding a nation's economic development, growth, and well-being. This paper acknowledges GDP's shortcomings and aims development more rounded metrics to better measure well-being. The aim of this thesis is to advance the work done by 2009 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by reassessing the twelve recommendations made by Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi and attempting to apply them to a new dashboard of metrics. JEL Classification I31 E01 E21 Keywords well-being, economic performance, GDP, Stiglitz Commission, quality-of-life, social progress Abstrakt Hrubý domácí produkt je historicky dominantní metrika v souvislosti s národním hospodářským rozvojem, růstem a blahobytem. Tato práce potvrzuje nedostatky HDP a jejím cílem je vývoj více vyvážené metriky k lepšímu měření blahobytu. Zaměřuje se na prohloubení práce Stiglitze, Sena a Fitoussiho z roku 2009 (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress), přehodnocuje jejich dvanáct doporučení a pokouší se je aplikovat na kolekci možných měření společenského rozvoje.
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Overview of Foreign Aid in the Balkan Countries: Selected problems
Mullaj, Genta ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Chytilová, Julie (referee)
This study attempts to ascertain the role of the World Bank and its problematical issues in Balkan countries. The foreign aid holds a key impact in these economies, but on the other hand it embraces a controversial aspect. The contradictory role of the World Bank lies in aid ineffectiveness at reducing poverty and sustaining economic growth. The foreign aid inflows did not manage to fulfill its objectives efficiently, since they created income inequalities in the region favoring distinctive economies. Corruption and bad-governmental management would expand the controversially further. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of aid on economic growth empirically using a panel data set comprising of five Balkan economies during 2000-2010 period. We find negative and significant evidence of aid impact on growth. Moreover, the relation between governance and growth resulted positive. Results display a clear framework of aid ineffectively across the region. The Balkan countries should therefore focus on a better effective management of the World Bank aid to reduce poverty, income inequality and to achieve the economic growth.
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Costs of Conflict: Empirical Analysis of the Economic Situation in Palestine and Israel
Pankina, Anastasia ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Semerák, Vilém (referee)
This thesis analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Deeply rooted in history, and dominated by mutual violence, the conflict has been causing considerable damage to society, politics and economics for several decades. The latest attempts for the peace negotiations process failed, leading to an escalation of tensions and the Second Intifada in 2000. The Israeli West Bank Barrier has been constructed with an aim to reduce the number of terrorist attacks and to stabilize the situation of the region. By using the synthetic control method, we evaluate the impact of the Second Intifada and the Barrier on GDP per capita. The results indicate that Israel benefits from the West Bank Barrier, in 10 years the country managed to completely recover from the substantial negative effect of the Second Intifada. On the other hand, the West Bank experienced a decline in GDP per capita at the beginning of construction since the Barrier damaged properties located close to the construction and restricted movement of goods and people. A couple of years later the situation stabilized, however, the West Bank was unable to achieve full recovery from the armed uprising of 2000, and the GDP per capita growth remained limited. The estimations for the whole of Palestine reveal a negative impact, that is also attributed to...
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European Sovereign Debt Crisis
Bořuta, Michael ; Dědek, Oldřich (advisor) ; Baxa, Jaromír (referee)
Financial crisis exposed the bad state of European public finance. Budget deficits are so domesticated in Europe, that it is hard nowadays to encounter a budget surplus, or at least a balanced budget. Greece once again entered the history, but this time Greeks have absolutely nothing to be proud of. Financial crisis has reintroduced phenomenon known only from war periods - heavily indebted rich countries. European Union never imagined such situation could occur and threaten the existence of the Eurozone, so there was no plan B prepared. In the thesis we would like to analyze the process of finding the plan B. Hundreds of billions euro were spent on bailouts of heavily indebted Eurozone Members. Using case studies of the most affected Eurozone economies we want to decide if the Euro was the cause of the European debt crisis. In the last part we will discuss institutional changes of the EU designed to strengthen economic stability of the Eurozone.
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Measuring corruption in developed countries
Bajzíková, Anna ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Janda, Karel (referee)
The complex issue of corruption has attracted much attention over the last 20 years. The problem was analyzed mostly in the context of developing and transition countries, though not only the recent financial crisis showed the severity of corruption also in the world's most developed countries. This thesis analyzes twelve currently available corruption assessments for a cross section of 39 developed countries in the period 2007-2010. The thesis categorizes these assessments into three basic generations and characterizes the weaknesses and limitations of particular methods. The analysis is based on determination of relationship between individual corruption measures and recognizes specific aspects of corruption actually measured by particular indices. With the exception of strictly opinion poll-based corruption indices, the first and the second generation of corruption indices correlate well for a set of developed countries. This indicates that the sector specific indices, e.g. expenditure corruption assessment, are in analyzed countries closely related to the overall political corruption levels. An applied hierarchical cluster analysis gives better picture of otherwise inconsistent developed countries corruption rankings and divides countries into ten homogeneous groups. However, the analysis...
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Pension Systems in a World with Stagnant Population and Market Inefficiencies: A Comparison
Štěpánek, Martin ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Švarcová, Natálie (referee)
Financial unsustainability of pension systems in developed economies looms large on the horizon due to increasing life expectancy and continuous drop in fertility. In spite of a broad discussion, there has been but a little consensus on appropriate remedy. Besides, the theoretical arguments supporting funded pension systems often build upon the unrealistic assumption of stable financial markets and fair transformation of saved funds into retirement benefits. This work provides an insight into performance of various pension systems in real- world conditions using large-scale simulations of an overlapping generations model based on existing pension schemes in the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Chile. Specifically, my model assumes adverse demographics, individual un- certainty, volatile financial markets' returns, and administrative costs to affect social security systems and estimates magnitude of the effects. According to the results, each pension system seems to be partially advantageous - in pro- motion of economic growth, level of retirement benefits, or protection against market risks - but no scheme is dominant or dominated overall. JEL Classification E27, C68, H55 Keywords pension, OLG, simulation Author's e-mail Stepanek.Martin@hotmail.com Supervisor's e-mail Jaromir.Baxa@centrum.cz
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On the Role of Exogenous Shocks in the Great Recession: the Evidence from Belarus
Ramanchyk, Nina ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Polyák, Oliver (referee)
In this thesis we provide evidence about the relative importance of foreign (Russian) and domestic monetary policy shocks for Belarusian economy. We employ a ten variable structural VAR model with block exogeneity and a set of dummy variables introduced to deal with instability of the data that corresponds to the periods of crises (2008 and 2011). We find that Belarus is significantly influenced by foreign shocks that account for 20 to 60 percent of fluctuations in domestic variables in the long run. The foreign demand and oil prices for Belarus are the main determinants of the domestic output and net export, while the foreign interest rate strongly affects Belarusian interest rate, money demand and the share of loans in GDP. Regarding the domestic monetary shocks, we find that the exchange rate is the most important channel in the Belarusian monetary transmission mechanism. We conclude that deeper trade integration with Russia could be beneficial for Belarusian economy, while in case of the monetary union creation the conduct of an independent monetary policy in Belarus could be further complicated.
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Evaluation of China's FOREX policy: equilibrium exchange rate perspective
Qiriga, ; Semerák, Vilém (advisor) ; Baxa, Jaromír (referee)
Master Thesis: Evaluation of China's FOREX Policy: Equilibrium Exchange Rate Perspective. Author: - Qiriga Supervisor: Ing. Vilém Semerák M.A., PhD. Academic Year: 2018/2019 Abstract This thesis investigated China's foreign exchange policy from the equilibrium exchange rate perspective, using the Fundamental Equilibrium Exchange Rate model with multiregional dimension. The core question is whether Renminbi is misaligned (over- or undervalued) from 2001 to 2017. The result indicated that the bilateral nominal exchange rate of Renminbi against the US dollar was undervalued from 2002 to 2013, reaching a peak of 34.2% in 2007. In the rest of the years, it was overvalued slightly against the US dollar. As to the real effective exchange rate (REER) of Renminbi, it was overvalued in the first three years of the 2000s, then went through the period of undervaluation of 9 years, with a smaller degree compared with the bilateral exchange rate. It is shown that from 2013 the REER of Renminbi had been overvalued for several years until it was undervalued again in 2017 by 2%. Keywords FEER, Renminbi, exchange rate misalignment, multinational model, real effective exchange rate
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Economic Impact of Margaret Thatcher Revisited
Stuchlík, Jakub ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Malovaná, Simona (referee)
Forty years after Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK, her past actions and reforms remain highly polarizing and influential. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that her government was a game-changing one in many aspects. In this thesis we test whether and to what extent her deconstruction of the Post-war consensus affected the UK's economic performance. We apply the synthetic control method in order to observe the overall economic impact of Thatcher's policies. We find significant evidence that M. Thatcher exploited the output-inflation trade-off, and the decrease of inflation was very much at the costs of a significant increase of unemployment. We have calculated that in case of continuation of Post-war consensus policies the inflation would be on average approximately 2.2% higher and unemployment 2.8% lower in time period 1980-1990.
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Three essays on Policy Evaluation and Analysis
Kopečná, Vědunka ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Steininger, Karl (referee) ; Brůha, Jan (referee) ; Janda, Karel (referee)
Three essays on policy evaluation and analysis Author Mgr. Vědunka Kopečná Year 2021 Advisor PhDr. Jaromír Baxa, Ph.D. No. of pages 164 This thesis consists of three articles sharing the main theme - evaluation of policies related to current issues both from micro and macroeconomic perspectives. The dissertation aims at the central European region. The first article presents a novel methodology of a hybrid dynamic computable general equilibrium model used to quantify socio-economic impacts of an emission abatement driven policy focused on adoption of electric vehicles in personal transport on the example of Austria. Heterogeneous micro-founded preferences are integrated into a dynamic computational general equilibrium model which is further linked to a bottom-up technology-rich electricity model and a stock-flow vehicle accounting model. Endogenously determined emissions from vehicle use, electricity generation, and production provide an input to quantify external costs attributable to air quality and carbon emissions using the Impact Pathway Analysis. The second article estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital, labour, energy and materials in the constant elasticity of substitution production function, which is being used in a majority of general equilibrium models. We use a non-linear...
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