Economy

People are either cannibals or creators. The fundamental difference between the two is how in their opinion the world works. What to do when you\'re hungry – eat a neighbour or come up with a solution to growing vegetables in the middle of winter? Is the world a “zero-sum game” in which one can prosper only if others suffer? Yes would be the answer of a cannibal.

After a long negotiation between milk producers, processors and sellers, the Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture has proposed a new bill that would severely tighten the regulation of the Lithuanian dairy market. The authors of the bill claim that their intention is to protect Lithuanian producers, bring confidence to the market and boost the consumption of milk products. But […]

The presidential project of the fiscal ordinance was supposed to improve this complex situation. The uncertainties in regulations were supposed to be interpreted in favour of the taxpayers. In other words, the responsibility for legal errors (bungles) would lie on the national state and not on physical persons.

The look back at 2014 will include mainly good news. While comparing to traditional benchmark – the average performance of the European Union – the Czech GDP growth rate was significantly higher than the growth rate of the EU. The Czech economy has had a faster growth than the EU in five quarters in a row.

The figures that chief executive officers (CEOs) read at their payrolls are medially very attractive information. Why? They are huge! People process the information in many ways – someone is rude, someone envies, someone is emulated… Anyway, the same question occurs: Why has CEOS’ pay increased so much?

We can find examples of negative interest rates in countries throughout history. But these are geographically or time-isolated cases. However, today we live in a world where more and more things are turning upside down. And one of such things is the fact that negative interest rates are shifting from a deviation to a norm (for the time being only within the financial system).

For years, liberals have been struggling to lower and simplify Polish taxes. The results are, however, rather “moderate”, labour cost remains high, the dream of PIT flat tax – once a flagship project of the Civic Platform – is rarely even mentioned, and the recent governmental “temporarily” raised VAT rate to 23% seems to be becoming permanent. Every year, taxes and charges to the benefit of the state, not visible at first glance, are raised.

I don\'t believe that we need central banking, monetary policy or our national monetary unit. Without this, we can\'t avoid two essential problems – politicization of the monetary politics and also its competitiveness. But by saying this I do not wish to imply that in this particular case of devaluation of the lari the central banking system was the major problem. Quite the opposite.

In the last few years, the compound word “start-up” has established itself in the Slovak language and is successfully edging out the original term – “a beginning entrepreneur”. A start-up, a start-uper, the start-up scene, a start-up strategy, a start-up investment – the media are packed to the rafters with such collocations. This is not […]

The new Greek government of the leftist party SYRIZA wanted to take back austerity reforms in order to, for example, “gradually restore salaries and pensions so as to increase consumption and demand”. But it seems that the only thing accepted by the European Commission and eurozone finance ministers is 4-month extension of the bailout in return for presenting a list of reforms that Greece had committed to undertake.