Volume 15 (2015): Edition 4 (December 2015)

The aim of the Round Table was to compare British and Czech experiences with railway regulation and competition introduction and to determine which lessons can be learnt. Special attention was paid to the question of whether the very complex British reform can be an inspiration for further liberalisation of the railway sector in the Czech Republic or whether there are any reform mistakes that are best avoided. Based on two introductory presentations and subsequent plenary discussion, some consensus emerged. The participants agreed that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to railway regulation and that the introduction of competition should take into account the different circumstances of a particular country. Franchising in passenger operations in Britain successfully stimulated demand but also increased costs to the industry, so its implementation should be completed with care. It seems very unlikely that open-access competition would be a viable solution for the whole passenger rail market because it is limited to a few commercially attractive routes, and as Czech experience suggests, it creates many new problems. Finally, it was confirmed that a strong and dedicated regulator is needed in a newly liberalised environment in order to solve many emerging conflicts and disputes.

Motivation represents a foundation cornerstone on which analyses in a number of humanities and social sciences are built. For a long time, economists have seen motivation as connected with the act of giving, trying to interpret it in the context of the neoclassical economics assumptions. The objective of this paper is to find answers to the question of what mainly motivates the Czech population in their decisions to make a donation and whether there is any interdependence among such motives. We also ask what the relationship is between the determining motives and the rate or frequency of donating. The donation models that we analyze and use as the basis of our research are nowadays considered being the principal or at least interesting donation models commonly taken into account by economists in their work. We have only focused on selected microeconomics models to make the text clearly targeted; specifically, we are examining the public goods model, private consumption model investment model and impure altruism model. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey and analysed by means of mathematical-statistical methods that are commonly used in similar cases, such as descriptive statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient and the ANOVA method based on the F-test. The empirical testing confirmed several assumptions connecting with this type of a research; however, our paper opened a space for a follow-up research, too.

E-government readiness is an important indicator of the quality of a country’s technological and telecommunication infrastructure and the ability of its citizens, businesses and governments to adopt, use and benefit from modern technologies. To measure and compare selected countries, a lot of benchmarking and ranking indices have been introduced since the beginning of the century. With the increasing importance of trends such as cloud computing, open (big) data, participation tools or social media, new indicators and approaches need to be introduced in the measuring of the e-government development, and the existing indices should to be updated, redefined and restructured. Therefore, this article explores the structure of the existing e-government development indices to show the main indicators and trends. Then, it proposes and implements a new framework to evaluate e-government development using these new trends in ICT. It also examines and compares a basic background on the e-government development, benefits and risks of cloud computing, open (big) data and participation tools in the public sector. Based on the newly proposed framework, the e-government development index is calculated for each EU Member State to clearly identify the indicators to have an influence on the e-government development. In the last part, these results are compared to the already existing indices to validate the conformity of the rank methods using Kendall rank correlation coefficient.

We conduct an exploratory analysis using proxy measures of cross-sectional returns and rental yields in residential real estate. Asset pricing models predict that expected returns should exhibit some sensitivity to one or several fundamental variables that represent a common source of undiversifiable risk. Residential real estate, just like works of art and collectibles, is unique because it represents both an investment vehicle and a durable consumption good. Its pricing and returns should thus reflect both the benefits from portfolio diversification and the effect of supply and demand. In this paper, we investigate the variation in proxy returns and proxy rental yields across 34 major European cities, using a handful of independent variables that should account for the influence of market risk, inflation, and liquidity. In spite of obvious limitations stemming from our sample, we find that the explanatory power of our model is unusually high for a cross-sectional data analysis. Some of our findings concur with other studies showing that in spite of strong segmentation, real estate markets respond to the same structural risk factors. A good portion of our results, however, is hard to explain and interpret. Either we need to take into account cultural differences between Eastern and Western Europe as part of a behavioral approach, or we have to concede that we have been misled by the mismatch in the level of aggregation and the crude estimation of the dependent variables.

The article analyses railway transport markets in three neighbouring Central European countries: the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany (specifically Bavaria and Saxony), with a focus on regional transportation. It examines the organisational form of public transport resulting from regionalisation and provides comparative case studies of regional train services in these countries. The article points out the organisational differences in public transportation between the studied regions and tries to connect these results with the supply of regional train services on various types of lines and in different geographical areas.