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European investment policy as an exclusive competence of the EU
Fořtová, Lenka ; Tomášek, Michal (advisor) ; Balaš, Vladimír (referee)
This thesis explores a new competence of the investment policy Union conferred upon the European Union by the Lisbon treaty. The reform of the primary legislation in 2009 incorporated foreign direct investment among the components of the Common Commercial Policy. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse this new component, to describe the means of its execution and to discuss the European investment policy in the context of European law. This research aims to be an introduction to this topic in the Czech academia as it is a very topical issue due to the ongoing negotiations with the United States on a free trade agreement including an investment chapter. The thesis is composed of three chapters, each of them dealing with different aspects of the European investment policy. The first two parts are more of a theoretical nature, whereas the last part is a practical demonstration of the policy results in the form of negotiated agreements. Chapter One is introductory and acquaints the reader with the systematics of the Common Commercial Policy in the section of External action in the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, its aims and principles and the scope of the newly conferred exclusive competence. It also defines basic terminology used in the thesis - the term foreign direct investment. Finally the last...
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Legal Framework of Protection of Foreign Direct Investment under Bilateral Investment Treaties and European Law
Moškvan, Dominik ; Svoboda, Pavel (advisor) ; Pítrová, Lenka (referee)
This thesis aims to analyse alleged incompatibility of bilateral investment treaties signed between the Member States of the European Union with the European Union law and its impact on the investment environment of the Union. Bilateral investment treaties are found to be incompatible with EU law. First, it is the provision allowing for dispute settlement in the form of arbitration, thereby excluding the case from EU judicial review and infringing the primacy and autonomy of EU law. Second, it is the preferential treatment of investors given only to an investor from a state with a concluded BIT conflicts the non-discrimination principle. Preferential treatment given in BITs should be either unilaterally extended, or dismissed for all investors. Unless rescinded, BITs remain valid. Investment environment of the European Union might be exposed to an increased risk of legal uncertainty. This is due to the existence of dichotomy of investment arbitration and national courts, which has not allowed for a binding interpretation of EU law since arbitration courts are not considered to be a court of a Member States with respect to the meaning of Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Concurrence of the two parallel systems of dispute resolution does not allow for a prompt...
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Six Essays on Meta-Regression Analysis
Havránková, Zuzana ; Dědek, Oldřich (advisor) ; Cahlík, Tomáš (referee) ; Babecký, Jan (referee) ; Fidrmuc, Jarko (referee)
This dissertation thesis consists of six papers on macroeconomics, international economics, and energy economics. All the papers are tied together by the use of meta-regression analysis, which is essential for the derivation of robust policy-relevant conclusions from often conflicting results presented in the empirical literature. I use meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the reported research results on a given topic, correct the literature for publication selection bias, and filter out the effect of various misspecifications present in some primary studies. My results can be summarized as follows: 1) The elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption, a key input to all dynamic models in finance and macroeconomics, varies significantly across countries. The differences can be explained by the level of stock market participation, when countries with higher participation exhibit larger values of the elasticity; the mean reported elasticity is 0.5. 2) The effect of borders on international trade, which most authors find to be surprisingly large, can be explained away by innovations in methodology introduced in the last decade. When these innovations are taken into account jointly, the border effect disappears for developed countries, and is relatively small for developing countries. 3) When...
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The Social and Political Regulation of Labour Migration: The Case of the Czech Republic
Čaněk, Marek ; Barša, Pavel (advisor) ; Kostelecký, Tomáš (referee) ; Woolfson, Charles (referee)
This dissertation is about the changes in the regulation of labour migration in the Czech Republic, specifically between the period of economic boom in 2007 and 2008 and the beginning of the global economic and financial crisis. The developments of labour migration processes and policies were studied in relation to the political economy of foreign direct investment and the rise of the competition state in the Czech Republic. The materialisation of these developments resulted in the Czech Republic's further integration into the global labour market. Labour migration policy changes in the case of the Green Card project, however, did not confirm the thesis that the Czech Republic's migration policy eventually became subordinated to the competition state project. Not only did the Ministry of Industry and Trade lack bureaucratic capital in the field of migration regulation but also, there were tensions between different notions of the competition state project while 'migration management' was reorganised in the interest of the Ministry of the Interior. Closely following struggles over the regulation of labour migration in the administrative and political fields, this dissertation contributes to literature on the labour migration perspective of the competition state. The migration crisis is studied from...
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Analysis of the Investment Development Path in the Central and Eastern European Countries: Can they move further?
Paul, Tomáš ; Seidler, Jakub (advisor) ; Kukačka, Jiří (referee)
The thesis analyses the investment development path (IDP) of CEE countries and discusses their movement to its later stages, which is conditioned by in- crease in outward foreign direct investment (FDI). Providing evidence on data until 2012, it enables to test the impact of global financial crisis on the validity of IDP and the stages reached by particular CEE countries. Moreover, the thesis explores the effect of inward reinvestment of earnings on the ability to move to later stages through the relationship with outward FDI, which has not been tested in the literature yet. The thesis on a cross-sectional basis shows that: a) CEE countries follow IDP; however, when using subsamples, it holds only for more developed ones; b) contrary to literature before crisis, CEE countries did not reach the third stage of IDP, which suggests that crisis could have caused movement back along their IDP; c) reinvestment of earnings positively influ- ences outward FDI. According to the latter, countries with high reinvestment of earnings and inward FDI stock are identified and is concluded that they are likely to enter the third stage of IDP. However, further research is needed as also other determinants are relevant for outward FDI, not only reinvestment of earnings.
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Determinants of foreign direct investment inflows to China: A Gravity Model Approach
Řezáč, Michal ; Semerák, Vilém (advisor) ; Břízová, Pavla (referee)
The main ambition of this thesis is the analysis of factors determining Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows with special focus on evaluating of the role of Chinese institutional framework in this process. Empirical part of the thesis employs random effects method as the main tool for estimation of FDI gravity model. The data set consists of observations of 189 source countries over the 1995-2011 period. The results suggest relatively low sensitivity of the source countries to the institutional factors. Besides the traditional FDI determinants such as gravity variables or cultural ties, the quality of property rights protection, tax burden imposed by government, and investment flow restrictions are found out to be important factors of Chinese FDI inflows. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Involvement of the People's Republic of China in Africa
Svobodová, Petra ; Kučerová, Irah (advisor) ; Karásek, Tomáš (referee)
Diploma thesis "Involvement of the People's Republic of China in Africa' deals with the evolution of China-Africa cooperation in the three specified time periods. Mainly it deals with the time period of the last nearly sixty years. This time period was subsequently divided into the period of the Cold War, 1990s and the last period is representing the year 2000 up to the present. Even though the diploma thesis deals with the African continent as a whole unit, the special emphasis was put on the four specific countries - namely Angola, Nigeria, Sudan and Zimbabwe. It analyses how the mutual cooperation has changed during these three different time periods and what has been the main components of China-Africa relationship. Primarily cooperation in the economic (foreign direct investments, foreign aid, balance of trade etc.), the political, but also the military sphere is analysed. The emphasis is also put on the Chinese status of a genuine alternative to the Western donor block, especially its policy of non- interference and aid without conditions. Diploma thesis also briefly touches on the approach of the traditional Western countries towards Africa (Washington versus Beijing Consensus). Positive and negative sides of mutual cooperation is also discussed.
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Treasure islands: the economic analysis of tax havens
Filip, Ondřej ; Janský, Petr (advisor) ; Adam, Tomáš (referee)
Bachelor Thesis Abstract This thesis strives to introduce a wider notion of tax havens. We alter a traditional paradigm by investigating tax havens' influence on economic performance of other countries. The first part of the thesis copes with issues implied by the absence of a suitable tax haven's definition which results in compiling an inclusive list of havens. Subsequently, we present a data-based description of the identified tax havens with an emphasis on several widely-held assertions. The second part delivers an empirical analysis. It illustrates the role of tax havens as financial intermediaries. We examined whether the volumes of capital flows between non-havens and tax havens correspond to the sizes of the counterpart economies and to their mutual distance. Foremost, we found intensified capital flows between tax havens and large non-haven countries in their close proximity. The thesis concludes by a discussion of results.
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Meta-Analysis in International Economics
Havránek, Tomáš ; Horváth, Roman (advisor) ; Stanley, Tom (referee) ; Wörz, Julia (referee) ; Vacek, Pavel (referee)
The dissertation consists of three papers presenting applications of meta-analysis in international economics. The first paper examines the effect of common currency on international trade, while the remaining two papers address the relationship between foreign investment and the productivity of domestic firms. An introductory chapter puts these applications into perspective. In the first application I present a meta-analysis of the effect of currency unions on trade, focusing on the euro area. I find strong publication bias in the literature. The estimated trade- promoting effect of currency unions other than the euro reaches more than 60%. In contrast, the euro's trade-promoting effect is insignificant when I correct for publication bias. The empirical literature on this topic shows signs of the so-called economics research cycle: the relation between the reported t-statistics and publication years has an inverse U-shaped form. During the last decade more than 100 researchers have examined productivity spillovers from foreign affiliates to local firms in upstream or downstream sectors. Yet results vary broadly across methods and countries. To examine these vertical spillovers in a systematic way, in the second application I collect 3,626 estimates of spillovers and review the literature quantitatively....
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Foreign investments and their influcence on the environment in the Czech Republic.
VONDRÁČKOVÁ, Martina
This thesis focuses on the influence of foreign investment on the environment. Foreign investment is an important factor of economic growth, but it also has a number of negative aspects. The theoretical part describes the impact of foreign investment, the issue of environmental sustainability and of environmental policies, and the successes of the Integrated Pollution Register. The aim of this thesis was to verify the hypothesis that foreign investors violate the environmental legislation. A database of polluters in the Czech Republic was compiled based on ownership, and the extent of polluting by Czech and foreign investors was subsequently assessed. The practical part uses statistical and comparative methods to evaluate and compare the results.
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