Economy

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at Davos that Slovakia could become a country that will experiment with a four-day working week. It is a flattering topic and so several media immediately picked up on it.

It is telling that the public almost unquestioningly believes that the minimum wage helps low-income people in particular. But as the prominent Czech economist Robert Holman writes in his textbook on microeconomics, \"If economists agree on anything, it is that legislating a minimum wage increases unemployment.\"

Advertisements are generally regarded as a socially undesirable phenomenon. At best, they are seen as a poor source of information about a company\'s products in an attempt to raise awareness of their existence and thereby win new customers, but more often as a despicable practice aimed at manipulating consumer preferences.

Why are expectations about the impact of government regulation so often not met? Why do the actual consequences of government interventions diverge countless times from the intentions of the politicians who promote them? Economics has elegant answers to these stimulating questions. One of them will be illustrated and explained in this article.

Donald Tusk outlined priorities for the Polish government for the next months. In his expose, he paid a lot of attention to entrepreneurs, promising to limit inspections of micro-entrepreneurs, introduce a cash-based personal income tax for entrepreneurs settling this tax with the tax authorities, and a vacation for entrepreneurs, i.e. one month a year free of social security contributions and a benefit of half the minimum wage.

Poland pledged to adopt the Euro when it joined the European Union in 2004. The adoption of the common currency will have a significant impact on the country\'s future and will define our position in Europe. It should be noted that entry into the Eurozone is not only an economic issue but also a major political and social change.

At the end of last week, the current proposal for changing the minimum wage level was published. It is interesting for several reasons, mainly because, for the first time, the new mechanism for determining the minimum wage is applied, linking it to the dynamics of the average wage. This, in the context of high inflation and the subsequent rapid growth of wages, leads to its largest nominal increase in the last two decades.

Slovakia\'s new government has finally succumbed to the Sweet Tax Temptation, as we called it in our last publication. The Ministry of Finance has published a preliminary announcement describing its intention to introduce the tax. You read that right; it is not the Ministry of Health that is in charge of the health of the population and the sustainability of health spending.

Imagine you are running a business. You have a small business or a trade, and you are doing just enough to maintain the same standard of living across challenging times. Then suddenly, without any increase in your income compared to the prices around you, the state tells you that you are already earning enough to pay more in taxes.

A new movement called degrowth is being mentioned more and more often in the media around the world. The aim of this movement is to address current environmental challenges by abandoning the \'economic growth paradigm.\' However, life and humanity as we know it today exist only because of economic growth. We would not be dealing with the environment today without years, decades, and centuries of economic growth.