Home

Population migration continues to be a current topic linked to a wide spectrum of various external and internal factors on both international and regional levels. In contemporary literature, there is a whole score of empirical studies that deal with international migration, its determinants and impacts on the economy. However, there are only few empirical studies that deal primarily with solely regional (i.e. internal) migration in comparison to the large number of studies analyzing international migration, which is one of the main reasons for the selection of the topic of this study and its focus on internal migration and thus on movements that take place within one geopolitical entity, usually a nationstate (for more on the definition of internal migration, see, e.g., Fendel, 2014; Royuela & Ordóñez, 2016). So-called “gravity models” stemming from an analogy to Newton’s law of gravity and Ravenstein’s laws of migration are often used for modelling internal migration and the study of it, or for the analysis of the main determinates that impact these internal fluctuations of citizens; however, these gravity models of migration are often criticized for their insufficient theoretical foundation.

On July 30, 2019, the government of the Czech Republic passed a draft Lobbying Act which was drawn up in accordance with the current Program Declaration of the Government of the Czech Republic, the Government Plan of Legislative Works for 2018 and Government Resolution No. 114 of 21st February 2018, approving the material proposal of the Lobbying Act. According to the Government’s Concept of the Fight Against Corruption for the years 2018 to 2022 (Government of the Czech Republic, 2018) “the intention of the government is to enable the public access to the information about the contact of politicians and high officials with lobbyists and at the same time relieve legitimate lobbying from negative connotations with which it is perceived by the public”. The aim of the article is to evaluate the lobbying regulation system in the draft Lobbying Act in the Czech Republic and to compare it with regulation models in selected European countries. A partial aim is to complement the assessment included in the Final Report on Regulatory Impact Assessment with a quantitative cost-benefit analysis by means of Ninefold theory.

The foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have exhibited substantial increases with contri bution of relaxation of the impediments over the international flows of goods, services and capital mainly resulting from the accelerating liberalization and globalization as of 1980s. Consequently, international FDI inflows reached USD 3.111 trillion in 2007, but then contracted due to economic crises and the increasing protectionism concerns in the recent years and became USD 1.95 trillion in 2017 (World Bank, 2019a). The rapidly expanding FDI flows made the economic effects of FDI one of the muchdiscussed and studied topics in the international economics. On the one hand, the scholars have focused on the effect of FDI inflows on the economic growth, unemployment, total taxes, technological development, environmental degradation (see, e.g., Lasbrey et al., 2018).

Risk management is one of the most dynamically developed areas in economic sciences. One of the main driving forces for this development has been the practical challenge resulting from increasing financial risk. Risk management is a process in which key role is played by risk measurement (Jajuga, 2016). Comparison of various forecasting models and selection of the best ones for particular markets is of key importance in many fields of economics and finance. Theoretic aspects concerning commodity markets very often concentrate on relations between changes in commodity prices and on the news impact on rates of return. However, up until now studies concerning conditional volatility of returns on commodity markets and market risk have been less comprehensive than those concerning conditions affecting prices and rates of return. Nevertheless, studies concerning market volatility are becoming increasingly popular due to the growth of market volatility itself and the significance of commodities as investment assets (Kang, 2013; Thuraisamy, 2013; Vivian, 2012). The growing interest also results from the fact that commodity rates of return have some empirically verifiable features such as non-normal distribution, asymmetry, structural breaks and fat tails (Aloui, 2010; Cheng, 2011).

How can you imagine the future of marketing communication? The last several decades have brought the unexpected development of marketing concepts and tools (Keller, 2009), conditioned by changes in the economic environment: globalization processes, internationalization of enterprises, increase in competitiveness, social change, development of information technology, popularization of proinnovation culture and, finally, “acceleration” of processes. Against the background of these market conditions, presentation and analysis of currently used communication forms and tools in the sector of small and medium enterprises, in terms of types and forms of messages, seems to be a very interesting topic and will enable diagnosing existing status and drawing conclusions about future organizational behaviour in this area. The need for conducting this kind of research results from constant changes in the architecture of marketing communication. The aim of the study was to learn the approach of small and medium entrepreneurs to customer value management processes through the prism of: quantity, intensity, quality of communication forms and tools. The research problem is the answer to the question: what forms and tools of marketing communication find practical application in the SME sector?