Volumen 22 (2022): Heft 1 (March 2022)

The paper deals with the topic of natural resource revenue management and the institutional background, it researches the impact of the institutional environment on a particular part of resource governance, the revenue governance. The Resource Governance Index is used as the crucial concept for the whole analysis. Using qualitative comparative analysis, it aims to find out which conditions, and their combinations, concerning the institutional background, lead to higher levels of revenue management. Firstly, it was found that individual institutional aspects impact the revenue management differently. The second finding is that voice and accountability is a sufficient condition for reaching higher levels of revenue management. On the contrary, the dimension of political stability and the absence of violence is an irrelevant condition. All the institutional aspects excluding political stability and the absence of violence create a consistent pathway to better achievements in revenue management, namely national budgeting, and subnational resource revenue sharing.

Understanding and using ICT is critical for increasing effectiveness of the public sector, improving access to public services, enhancing transparency and engagement of various stakeholders in public decision-making processes. At the same time, utilization of new emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, open data, social media, or Internet of Things has become more commonplace in recent years. This study aims to understand what determines ICT disparities and digital divides in the context of new technologies and digital world shifts. For this purpose, a theoretical framework of ICT-related indicators elucidating differences between the traditional and new approach is proposed. These ICT indicators were identified through the decomposition of related ICT and e-government indices together with explanatory factors derived from the literature. The European Union Member States were chosen as a sample for the exploratory analysis because of the availability of relevant indicators. More specifically, correlation, factor, regression, and cluster analyses were employed as empirical strategies to carry out this study. The Human Development Index together with research and development expenditure are the most important explanatory factors for the new approach, while the traditional set of indicators is still mostly correlated with the gross domestic product per capita. Finally, five clusters of Member States were identified and their implications for improving the use of ICT in the public sector are described.

This article examines the procyclicality of banks’ credit losses and provisions in the Czech Republic using pre-2018 data and then discusses the implications of the findings for provisioning in stage 3 under IFRS 9. This analysis is possible because the majority of banks seem to have aligned their accounting definitions of default with the regulatory definition before the implementation of IFRS 9. Based on our results, we find significant asymmetries in the Czech banks’ behaviour over the cycle. Firstly, provisioning procyclicality is the strongest in the later contractionary phase and the early recovery phase, while it is non-existent in the early contractionary phase. Secondly, banks with higher credit risk behave more procyclically than their peers with lower credit risk. If this behaviour persists under IFRS 9 and banks do not change their provisioning behaviour from backward to forward-looking, it may lead to a delayed transfer of exposures between stages and aggravate cyclical fluctuations.