The lack of an effective judiciary in post-socialist countries has been a pervasive concern and successful judicial reform an elusive goal. Yet to date little empirical research exists on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world. We draw on a new court-level panel dataset from Bulgaria to study the determinants of court case disposition and to evaluate whether judicial decision-making is subject to a quantity-quality tradeoff. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we find that case disposition in Bulgarian courts is largely driven by the demand for court services. The number of serving judges, a key court resource, matters to a limited extent only in a subsample of courts, a result suggesting that judges adjust their productivity based on the number of judges serving at a court. We do not find evidence implying that increasing court productivity would decrease adjudicatory quality. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.
COBISS.SI-ID: 15327569
The paper presents the analysis of the degree of convergence within two groups of countries analyzing Eurostat’s Service Confidence Indicator – SCI indicator. In that matter we analyzed sigma (σ) and beta (β) convergences among the five European countries which accessed the European Union in 2004 and among five old EU member countries. In the context of analyzing services confidence convergence, and as a subdivision of services, we put a special focus on convergence in Tourism sector. By analyzing β convergence we tested the volume of tourist arrivals and nights spent by tourists. Time series data for all selected variables covers the period between the years 2003 and 2011. Our results confirm that convergence of Service Confidence Indicator occurred in the service sector at the rate of 0,6 % during the whole analyzed period between the years 2003 and 2011 and 2,2 % and 0,9 % during the sub periods between the years 2003 and 2007 as well as in the sub period 2009 and 2011, respectively. We also found out that the group of EU–5 economies is converging towards the group of CEE–5 economies. Regarding the results of testing β convergence for both selected variables in Tourism sector, no convergence was found, meaning that the initial volume of tourist arrivals and nights spent by tourists did not influence its growth rate over the period between the years 2003 and 2011.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5121323
The aim of this empirical study is to evaluate the influence of the interdependence of C-B M&As and the quality of the institutional setting on GDP per capita using dynamic panel data analysis for 22 European transition countries from 2000 to 2014. Our empirical results suggest that current M&As have a negative effect on GDP per capita in the year of merger or acquisition, but the influence of their lagged level has a strong positive effect one year later. All governance indicators are found to have a significant effect on GDP per capita while the only significant interaction term between C-B M&As and control of corruption is negative. This implies that the higher level of C-B M&As with its negative impact offset the positive effect of control of corruption on economic growth in current period.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12673308
In the empirical literature there is a prevalent view that real exchange rates tend to converge towards levels predicted by the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) only in the long-run and that short-run deviations from the PPP relationship are frequently sizable. The progressing of European monetary integration and the forming of monetary union spurred the interest of researchers to assess the relevance of the PPP theory also in the case of single European currency. Our paper therefore examines this exchange rate theory by testing a dataset of monthly real exchange rates for a sample of eleven eurozone members with respect to different benchmark currencies. Because of the documented drawbacks of linear specifications in examining this exchange rate theory, we utilize a nonlinear unit root test based on the ESTAR model proposed by Kapetanios et al. (2003). The results of unit root tests for the US dollar-based real exchange rate series as well as for Japanese yen-based series suggest that the PPP proposition does not hold in the case of eurozone countries. The absence of real exchange rates nonlinear reversion reported in this study thus confirms the thesis of Wu and Lin (2011) regarding the PPP relationship since the inception of the euro.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12349724
This is the first book which analyzes the entire infrastructure of Slovenia. The first part consists of theory of infrastructure, the sample of relevant literature on the subject, and presents the best practices with investing and managing the infrastructure. The second part describes infrastructure of Slovenia, its historical view, the existing strategies and normative solutions for all constitutive elements of Slovenian infrastructure, including the question of ownership. Empirical part presents the comparative analysis of Slovene infrastructure development with other EU members and other countries. The third part discusses the future of Slovene infrastructure with some open issues and measures required for its successful development. Relative underdevelopment of infrastructure was an obstacle for Slovene economic and social economic growth and social development in the past. But, based on favorable natural resources investing in Slovene infrastructure could contribute to faster growth and development of Slovenia in the future.
COBISS.SI-ID: 283874560