Suchergebnisse

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

AbstractHomophily—the preference for people similar in their characteristics—is a strong determinant of many types of human relationships. It affects, for example, whom we marry and potentially also whom we vote for. We use data on preferential voting from eight (1996–2021) Czech parliamentary elections matched with census and administrative data to identify the effect of homophily on voting behavior. The Czech system of preferential voting is well suited to an analysis of homophilic preferences, as it enables us to filter out preferences for political parties and focus solely on candidates' individual background characteristics. We identify the effect of homophily on a sample of 6,844,538 observations from small municipalities that are not likely to be affected by potential electoral list optimization. We find that a 1 % increase in the share of a municipality's population whose education level or age are the same as the candidate's increases the number of preferential votes the given candidate receives by 0.5% or 0.2% respectively. We also find evidence for strong geographical homophily as living in the municipality substantially increases the number of preferential votes a candidate receives.

AbstractThis paper focuses on the Czech economic transition and aims to identify the determinants of unusually high and long‐lasting public support for market reforms. The study is based on a unique combination of statistical analysis of survey data and oral history (interviews with reformers, managers etc.), which has enabled us to depict the views of the general public as well as of many people involved in decision‐making processes on both macro and micro levels. These findings allow us to propose recommendations on how to gain and maintain public support for economic reforms. Above all, reformers must utilize the period of euphoria and communicate the individual steps of reform with the public.

AbstractThis paper addresses the performance of international trade during the centrally planned period in socialist Czechoslovakia and its consequences in the transition period. The goal of the paper is to determine whether the relative export competitiveness before 1989 positively influenced the performance of the enterprises in the transition period. To determine the reason for the low competitiveness of socialist enterprises, we use the oral history method, based on interviews with the then managers. We show that the level of competitiveness was influenced by multiple factors. Some of them were of a systemic nature, such as incentive structure, which did not encourage managers to pursue higher productivity, and others were related to day‐to‐day operations of the enterprises and a lack of Western technologies. Consequently, an econometric analysis is applied to determine whether there was any relationship between competitiveness in late socialism (ability to export to world markets) and production growth in the transition period. We expected that sectors that were able to export to Western markets during the centrally planned period were more successful after the fall of the regime. However, our findings do not support this hypothesis.

Rational agents react to incentives in the market economy as well as in the centrally planned economy. Economic laws are persistent regardless of the economic system. The legislative system changes the outcome of the game between economic agents and managers. The aim of this paper is to show how rational agents reacted to legislative incentives in the Soviet-type economy in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, that is, how they reacted to the general shortage in the centrally planned economy. Based on the original survey among former managers as well as on the legislative sources from the 1970s and 1980s, a taxonomy was made of economic reactions to the shortage economy. This survey was possibly the last chance to map the experiences of socialist managers who tried to run companies in the centrally planned economy. We distinguish plan manipulation in order to ensure payment bonuses; bribery in order to obtain short-supplied inputs and the creation of reserves for the purpose of fulfilling the plan. It was shown that, if the rational agent wanted to obey the higher law, he was forced to ignore lower legislation.