Volume 22 (2022): Issue 2 (June 2022)

Activation of the unemployed has been an important topic among policymakers during the last decades. This paper reviews the current measures in Slovenia in the area of activation of unemployment benefit recipients and it compares its formal requirements related to activation against the international background. The paper focuses on five activation areas: adjustment of unemployment benefit eligibility, improving employment services, participation in active labour market policies, monitoring and sanctions. The review lists several recommendations Slovenia should apply to activate unemployment benefit recipients, including introducing more demanding job search requirements and increased monitoring of the compliance with these requirements, introducing compulsory participation in active labour market programs, checking the consistency and effectiveness of the current profiling system, and strengthening the ex-ante effect of sanctions.

Existing studies have provided evidence of job polarization in many developed countries. The issue of wage polarization is less obvious: many articles do not address it at all, and some even confuse it with job polarization. At the same time, the significance of the phenomenon of polarization results precisely from the consequence of wage polarization: the increase in wage inequality. The aim of this article is to find out whether wage polarization occurred in the Czech Republic during the period 2004–2018. Wage development in the private sphere does not imply wage polarization, but in the public sphere, results imply a very slight wage polarization mainly due to the development between 2004 and 2010. This phenomenon has occurred in both male and female occupations. Panel regression analysis shows that globalization reduces upper-tail inequality (the ratio Q90/Q50) while increasing lower-tail inequality (the ratio Q50/Q10). At the level of the whole economy, technology seems to contribute to reducing both upper-tail and lower-tail inequality. These results probably correspond to the nature of the Czech economy, which is based on middle-skilled workers with a pro-export focus.

This research builds on previous studies in the field of financial structure and develops knowledge for the construction industry in eight selected countries in Central and Eastern Europe – Visegrád Group, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Romania. The aim of the research is to examine the influence of profitability, asset structure, the GDP growth rate and the reference interest rate on the level of total, long-term and short-term debt of companies. The research period is from 2009 to 2018. The main conclusion of the research is the finding that the amount of debt of selected construction companies is most affected by the determinants of the external environment – the development of the economy and the reference interest rate. This conclusion applies regardless of the size of the companies. The direction of the resulting impact differs, as each of the economies underwent a different economic development during the period under review. The interest rate negatively affected the amount of debt of Polish, Romanian and Hungarian companies, given the higher interest rates in these economies; the remaining companies have a positive impact. The impact of the GDP growth rate on the amount of debt is mainly negative for Romanian companies regardless of size, medium-sized Polish and Austrian companies, and large Czech companies; a positive effect was found for the remaining companies. Economies have grown for most of the period under review, and negative impacts may mean taking advantage of profits, which usually grow during periods of prosperity and are a cheap source of funding. This does not necessarily mean economic problems and, as a result, declining debt due to the unavailability of debt financing.

After a prolonged period of relatively stable price levels, the beginning of the third decade of the 21^st century has brought inflation once again into the spotlight. This paper focuses on the inflation dynamics in a set of post-communist countries that eventually became members of the European Union. Due to EU accession augmented by the globalization process and involvement in global value chains (GVC), the international impacts are becoming progressively important for the domestic inflation dynamics and domestic variables are not sufficient to fully describe the domestic inflation dynamics. The employed methodology, Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) approach, allows modelling interactions and spillovers among countries, making the most of its advantages over the usual VAR models that model each economy separately and panel models, where countries are often treated as independent units. The results of the empirical analysis confirm that the globalisation process has led to increasing the importance of international impacts on the domestic inflation dynamics. On the other hand, the results also indicate that accounting for a larger set of countries decreases the severity of the commodity price shocks and makes them less persistent. Furthermore, monetary policy acts as a buffer against adverse shocks, especially in the countries that are still not members of the euro-zone. The findings of the paper show that the analysed countries are pronouncedly heterogeneous. Hence, each of the analysed economies has its own set of country-specific factors which, from country to country, play a more important or a less significant role in explaining national inflation dynamics. Thus, the paper should contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the inflation dynamics in the policy-making context.