Volumen 61 (2015): Heft 6 (December 2015)

Portugal is a member of the group known by investors as ‘PIIGS’, countries characterised by having high public debt and weak economic growth. Using an extended time horizon, 1974–2014, this study seeks to empirically explore the relationship between economic growth and public debt in the PIIGS economies, particularly in the case of Portugal. Based on the estimation of linear regression models, it was concluded that in the last four decades there has been a negative relationship between economic growth and public debt in both cases, which is consistent with the literature. The negative relationship was even more pronounced in the case of the PIIGS than it was in the case of Portugal.

The financialisation of economies is believed to be the primary cause of the increase in income inequality in the world, occurring on a scale unseen for more than 30 years. One can hypothesise that it is the state that is responsible for the widening inequality, as the state has not sufficiently used the redistributive function of taxation. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of tax policy on income inequality in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. These so-called Visegrad countries have, in the last several years, carried out some controversial experiments with tax policy, specifically in terms of the flattening of tax progressivity or its replacement with a flat tax, which led to the weakening of the income adjustment mechanism. The imbalance between income tax and consumption tax has contributed to perpetuating income inequality. The verification of tax systems carried out during the recent financial crisis has forced the countries included in this research to implement tax reforms. The introduced changes caused various fiscal and redistributive effects. Analyses show that the changes in income taxation and an increase in the consumption tax rate had the most negative impact on the income and asset situation in Hungary.

In this paper, we focus on the importance and influence of employees’ values as an essential element of organizational culture in the acquisition of knowledge. Based on empirical research, we studied the influence of employees’ values in Slovenian organizations on the acquisition of knowledge, enabling us to identify the core values that exert the greatest effect on the acquisition of knowledge. The results of the analysis confirmed the positive impact of employees’ values on the acquisition of knowledge. We found that the more employees are dedicated to personal development and the more they feel connected and loyal to the organization, the more they are inclined to the development and acquisition of knowledge.

Image has become one of the most important factors of stores’ survival and development. In this paper, a model of relationships among the multidimensional variables of store image, positive affect, satisfaction with the store, trust and commitment to the store is formed and tested with a sample of 209 customers in three stores in the Pomurje region of Slovenia. The important conclusion of the research is that several interrelations among store image, positive affect, satisfaction, trust and store commitment exist. The results also show significant gender differences in perceptions of store image. These results provide several important insights for managing supermarkets in the Slovenian market and are also important for future research.