Volume 14 (2014): Edizione 1 (March 2014)

Psychological traits, attitudes and soft skills represent factors whose effect on an individual’s wages has begun to be examined recently. Today, there is an extensive empirical body on wage returns to the first two factors, but still a relatively small one on wage returns to soft skills, such as communication, cooperation, leadership etc. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of empirical literature on wage returns to soft skills. It suggests that soft skills are connected with significant wage returns and contribute to closing the gender wage gap. The end of the paper focuses on a discussion on methodological approaches to measurement of soft skills and relevancy of their approximation by job characteristics (incl. suggestion of using tools of competency modelling for this purpose).

The article provides an analysis of a competitive situation in railway transport in Germany and defines areas where the Deutsche Bahn holding, which integrates both infrastructure operators and carriers, may behave in an anti-competitive way. First of all, conditions of liberalisation in German railways and position of competition in partial sections of transport are introduced. Subsequently, areas which are - from the economic point of view - necessary for operation of competition in the railway sector are identified: it is the height of fees charged for utilisation of transport routes, fees for the use of railway stations, and finally, traction energy fees, too.

On the basis of research into development in the last two decades, steps which are possible to consider to be (minimally) concealed anti-competitive behaviour of the Deutsche Bahn, was were revealed in all areas. This is substantiated by decisions of several decisive regulatory authorities, most predominantly of Bundesnetzagentur and courts, which have repeatedly ordered Deutsche Bahn to revise price lists and other terms.

In consequence, the example of Deutsche Bahn demonstrated a great disadvantage of an integrated company including infrastructure administrator and carrier, as it is offered a great space for influencing competitive environment. In the German example, this often comprised in raising competitor´s costs which, however, do not manifest themselves in economic results of the holding company. Should transport policies of the state decide to separate the infrastructure administrator and the carrier, a great deal of hard-to-reveal and thus punishable “complications” preventing establishment of conditions of free competition on the railway market shall cease to exist.

The aim of this article is to analyse appropriateness and adequacy of use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in several research papers dealing with effectiveness of economy of universities. The Data Envelopment Analysis is an interesting method used for evaluation of technical efficiency of production units. Comparison is the basic method of this article. At the beginning, basic methodological questions of measurement and evaluation of efficiency are analysed, including definitions of terms efficiency and effectiveness, ways of measurement and formulation of appropriate indicators. Based on the given perquisites for measurement and evaluation of efficiency five articles on evaluation of efficiency of universities using DEA method, published in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Germany and Spain in 1998 - 2008, will be assessed.

DEA is able to use more parameters of input and output to evaluate which of units under examination is the most effective, and to compare other units with it. For this, it is necessary to have a homogenous group of units. The result of assessment shows that all the examined studies focused rather on way of calculation then the point and reason of measurement. The articles contain a discussion concerning choice of appropriate indicators but do not at all deal with the issue of its construction using interventional logic; the articles do not contain any comparison of objectives of the particular universities.

Evaluation of efficiency of universities is a social construct and it will always be a subjective matter related to objectives of a particular stakeholder. This fact explains how to approach the evaluation of efficiency: it is necessary to set an objective function that means to set the objectives of a given stakeholder and his preferred results and outputs. All the studies lack this basic logic.

The paper analyses transformation process in Hungary between 1989 and 2004. The goal of this paper is to analyze and evaluate the transformation process in Hungary. The structure of the paper follows this general goal. First of all, an analysis of economic development of the country before the fall of the communist regime is carried out because this determined the whole process which followed. Then we shortly mention political development that had a significant impact on the transformation process and its results. In the next part we concentrate on the main steps in the economic transformation, and consequently we devote space to specific aspects - privatization, for example. The main economic indicators of this period are analyzed in the final part. We conclude that the transformation process achieved its main economic goal and the economy’s ability to grow increased. At the same time, however, the transformation process created environment for the subsequent economic problems.