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Rising income inequality is a growing concern for governments due to its adverse effect on the poverty level, income distribution, social and institutional stability, which in turn impede the economic growth and may lead to political instability. Taxation has long been regarded as the key instrument in a fiscal policy to reduce income inequality via the redistribution of tax revenues to finance public goods and to correct for market-income inequality (Atkinson, 1991). Although prior studies have extensively investigated the effect of taxation on income inequality (Martinez-Vazquez et al., 2012), the findings are inconclusive especially in developing countries (Bird & Zolt, 2014).

Research and development (R&D) is of fundamental importance in the creation of knowledge, products and technologies (Solow, 1956; Jones, 1995; Köhler et al., 2012; OECD, 2012; Szarowská, 2016; 2017). Generally, governments have three main instruments for financing R&D (own R&D, direct funding and indirect funding), each of which has advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of economic theory (David et al., 2000). The financial crisis prompted many governments to introduce tough fiscal consolidation measures and to prioritize other issues over R&D. However, Hud and Hussinger (2015) note that to prevent firms from reducing their R&D expenses and to maintain national R&D capacities, policymakers in many countries reacted immediately to the crisis and increased the public R&D budget.

Sympathetic movement between the nominal interest rate on long-term government bonds and the price level first observed by Gibson (1923) remains an open academic debate. Academic debates on Gibson paradox range from being nothing more than a spurious statistical relation to a fact strongly disputing standard micro and macroeconomic theory. The debate today is revived in a period of historic low-interest rates and deflation in many world economies. Keynes (1930/2011) speaks of the observed relation as the most completely established empirical fact in economics.

The National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) are key actors of destination management at national level. The complexity and professionalism of their involvement in tourism management has been growing in recent years, both in the field of the destination marketing and in terms of tourism promotion forms, support for statistics and tourism research. An important impetus and new opportunities for the development of NTO’s activities represent new technologies, especially HDR photo and video, panoramic photos, virtual reality and mobile technologies, including extended reality. These technologies change the NTO marketing (Lange-Faria & Elliot, 2012). New technologies are also part of the social media, the most dynamic element of the current NTO marketing and, more generally, the destination marketing at all geographical levels (Kiráľová & Pavlíčeka, 2015).

According to Shah (2015), economic growth is a primary and crucial aim of national and regional economies. International trade, based on exploitation of the benefits of comparative advantage, is treated as one of the key Determinants of a sustainable economic growth. Being a structural part of the overal international trade, the international trade in agricultural products is an important engine of economic progress. Despite the abundance of the scientific studies proving the positive links between international trade and national and/or regional economic growth (Sun & Heshmati, 2010; Adhikary, 2010; Busse & Koniger, 2012; Fetahi-Vehapia & Sadikub, 2015; Vojtovic, 2016; Kljucnikov & Popesko, 2017; Weng et al., 2017, Simionescu et al., 2017 etc.), the international trade in agricultural products thus far has not earned the sufficient scientific attention.