Continuing concentration of retail chains with prevailing assortment of fast moving consumer goods is empirically visible tendency present in Europe, overall consolidation of chains on saturated markets in situation of reserved consumer optimism is inavoidable. Such circumstances enable changes...

The author undertakes in his essay a risky experiment as he tries to look at the present-time-economic-transformations in the view of the great thinker of 18th century, Dr. Bernard Mandeville, who famed by his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices and Public Benefits. The philosophy of Mandeville,...

This paper considers the legitimacy, scope and purposes of redistribution in Czech society. The authors use data from international surveys from the mid-nineties onward, as well as several national Czech surveys. The authors claim that Czech society does not favor extensive redistribution in...

This paper deals with the situation on the European labour market and especially on the Czech labour market. It shows the impact of long-term unemployment - a crucial problem in contemporary European countries - on the economy and on the society and its integrity. Great attention is paid to the...

The paper summarises the results of various economic concepts of minimum wage. Consecutively, it presents an analysis of the minimum wage development in the Czech Republic since its introduction in 1991 and of the impact of substantial changes in its level, which can be observed since 1999. The...

Almost all of us sometimes voluntarily give up some scarce resources to make someone else better. Not only the amount of resources used for such purposes, but also other wider concerns (implications for private and government sector) have drawn the attention of economists in recent decades. In...

This essay examines the influence of income differentiation on private consumption. The author illustrates how to derive the total demand on individual goods from curves describing the income differentiation within the population (e.g., Lorenz) and the Engel curve. This model is later used to...

Sociální pøíjmy a danì významnì pùsobí na rozdìlení pøíjmù ve spoleènosti. Zkoumání jejich redistribuèní funkce je proto tøeba vìnovat dostateènou pozornost. Porovnání rozdìlení hrubého a èistého pøíjmu ukazuje, zda je systém daní a sociálních dávek...

This paper uses a specific experiment — „voucher privatization“ in the former Czechoslovakia — to test the permanent income hypothesis of consumer behavior. Voucher privatization (the mass privatization of state-owned assets through publicly offered vouchers) led to an unexpected...