Diasporic policy, support of short-term stays in country of ancestors and their impact on intensification of ethnic return migration: Diasporic descendants’ immigration from western Ukraine to the Czech Republic1

Public policy, as the youngest of the political sciences, began to take shape in the early 1950s in the field of political science, particularly in the United States, under the influence of empirical research in the framework of the so called Policy Analysis. The use of sociological methods in this research was one of the factors that shifted political science toward public policy theory, while sociological inspiration was also present in the theoretical plane of this shift (for example, the influence of J. Dewey on H. Lasswell, etc.). Alongside, the American school, in Germany Politikfeldanalysen developed in a partly different direction, and the French politique publique with the strongest influence of sociology. Some attention has already been given to comparing these “national schools” in the development of public policy and its theory in these “classical” countries. The present study compares the course of the interaction between political science, sociology, and public policy in three Central European countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland – where these relations were able to develop only following the establishment of democratic social order in the early 1990s. Both in the Czech and Slovak Republic, during totalitarian political system political sciences ceased to exist and when back in 1990s they were restored, sociologists participated as well, which, in turn had positive impact on the start of public policy within the framework of political sciences. In Poland, however, the politology cal science survived in a format under influence of ideology, but it did not established a framework to give rise to public policy, that was here replaced by other sciences.

This paper aims to present the role of Germany in the global value chains (GVCs) of 10 Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) in 1995–2011. GVCs, being a result of the fragmentation of production processes, have changed the nature of economic globalisation. The study covers five Central European countries (CECs) (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), the three Baltic States (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) as well as Bulgaria and Romania. Germany is chosen because it is the main trading partner of the majority of the CEECs. The illustration of the position of Germany in GVCs of the CEECs is based on trade statistics in value added terms. The research results show that Germany has become an engine of increasing integration of the CECs in the GVCs. The role of Germany as a supplier of inputs to the CECs’ exports (backward linkages) is larger than its role as an exporter of value added originating from the CECs (forward linkages).

The population of Central European countries (CECs) is becoming less enthusiastic about European Union (EU) accession than was the case immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is feared that consumers will have to pay higher food prices. National agricultural policies of most CECs are less protective than the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Its implementation is therefore expected to lead to adjustments in farm production, farm incomes and consumer welfare. Farmers in CECs are concerned about growing competition from Western Europe. The 'Central and Eastern European Countries Agricultural Simulation Model' (CEEC-ASIM) (Frohberg et al., 1997) is used to assess these impacts for Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia (CEC-I), the potential first-wave accession countries. In this paper a scenario of EU accession under full application of the EU market regulations is compared with one of unchanged national agricultural policies.

The article views the theme of institutionalizing intersectionality from the point of view of selected Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). After some historical and conceptual background, the first part of the article discusses the position and competencies of equality bodies in Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia and Latvia. The selection of countries crosses two traditional comparative clusters – Central European countries and Baltic states. This seems to be an opportunity to identify similarities and differences across a wider than usual geographical area. The implementation of EU requirements as regards equality bodies and the role of civil society actors in institutionalizing intersectionality in selected countries are the subject of interest in parts two and three. The last part of the article discusses in more detail the case of coercive sterilizations of Roma women, as an example of intersectional discrimination in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The article concludes that a role for non-governmental organizations as active civil society actors is indispensable for institutionalizing intersectionality in the CEECs, along with more positive or affirmative forms of action to promote equality and the influence of international law.

In 1998, the European Union (EU) entered into negotiations with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia concerning the enlargement of the Union. At the end of 1999, the European Commission decided that six other countries could join the negotiations in 2000 (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Malta and Romania), and it was suggested that a decision concerning the date of membership would be taken in 2002 for these applicants fulfilling all the criteria. Many questions still remain on both sides, in particular regarding institutional reform of the EU (Festoc, 1998), and the ability of the Central and Eastern European countries to adopt the “acquis”. In this article, we shall evaluate the ways in which the Central European countries (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — the CECs) have already integrated to the Western European economy, using trade data over the last ten years. First, we show that since the beginning of the transition, a feature of the foreign trade of the CECs has been a strong reorientation from East to West, in particular to Germany, together with a rapid growth in trade between the EU and the CECs. Second, we describe the trade structure, focussed on foreign direct investment as a mean of developing new exports. The third and fourth sections study the development of the specialisations of the CECs and the nature of trade between the CECs and the EU respectively.

Biogas energy has been introduced into Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) through various incentives after their accession to the European Union in 2004. This paper contributes to an understanding of the determinants, challenges and perspectives of agricultural biogas plants in three CEECs (Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic). Using a combination of quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) methods, it particularly addresses varieties in public support for biogas sectors, how the relationships between biogas plants as new energy entities and their locations in rural peripheries are constructed, and how the operation of biogas plants influences local rural development. We found that as a result of various agriculture and agricultural policies in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the second half of the 20th century, the preconditions for the incorporation of agricultural biogas plants into agriculture and rural space generally differ significantly. While in the Czech Republic and Slovakia agricultural biogas plants were usually established within large-scale agricultural farms, in Poland these are rather located off-farm. The most profound challenge for today’s biogas plants in all the CEECs studied lies in the transition from direct public incentives to a more self-sufficient business-oriented model focused on cooperation, participation and the involvement of local stakeholders in decision-making, as well as the energy utilization of locally generated agricultural waste and biowaste from households. By accommodation of these principles, agricultural biogas plants in CEECs might become a more useful and sustainable element of the rural energy transition.

The 1691G>A FV variant has been described as a common genetic risk factor in venous thromboembolism. The purpose of this study was to provide a further frequency value for 1691G>A FV in Poland and to collate summary data from Central (Poland, Czech, Slovakia), Eastern (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) and South-Eastern (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria) European countries. For this purpose in 2007 the 1691G>A FV variant was analyzed by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism from DNA collected in 2005-2006. We studied 650 subjects: 400 newborns and 250 older individuals (mean age 46.1 y) from Poland and compared results with reports from other countries, as well as with the frequency trend of 845G>A HFE across South-Eastern European countries using centroid cities. From our 1691G>A FV study we identified 626 GG homozygotes, 23 GA heterozygotes, and 1 AA homozygote (n = 650), giving an A allele frequency of 1.9%, and a summed frequency value for Poland of 2.0% (n = 1588); the frequency in Central European countries was 3.9% (n = 4559), mostly due to the high value in the Czech Republic: 5.1% (n = 2819); the South-Eastern European countries had 2.5% (n = 2410). Among the Eastern European countries the 1691G>A FV allele frequency was 1.9% (n=791), between the South-Eastern and Eastern European countries there was no significant difference (p=0.17). We confirm that the 1691G>A FV allele frequency in Poland, as well as other countries compared, is significantly lower than that in Czech.

Demographic changes which took place in the 20th century clearly reveal progressive ageing of whole societies. This phenomenon influences the risk connected with calculating the products of insurance companies and pension funds, where calculated mortality is one of the most important factors. The paper presents the analysis of mortality changes in male and female populations in selected countries from Central Europe (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) and from Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain and Sweden) in the period 1960-2006. The analysis of the mortality changes has been carried out with the use of variables proposed in 2007 by J. P. Morgan in his work Life Metrics - A toolkit for measuring and managing longevity and mortality risks. The data used for the analysis have been obtained from www.mortality.org. The van Broekhoven algorithm has been applied for smoothing crude mortality rates across different ages. The analysis of mortality changes in selected European countries in the period 1960-2006 has shown considerable differences in the changes of initial mortality rate. Apart from obvious differences in male and female mortality, significant differences in the dynamics of mortality between Western and Central European countries were revealed. The most significant differences in the change of graduated initial mortality rate have been observed for people above 40-45 from Central and Western European countries. The period of most striking disproportions in the change of graduated initial mortality rate were the years 1970-1990, which seems to be the result of the socioeconomic policy in Central European countries.

Declining mortality from kidney cancer in Europe

This paper examines the care for nature in Croatia based on the European Social Survey (ESS) data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018) over time and cross-nationally, in comparison with five other Central European (CE) countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). We correlate the item about the care for nature with Schwartz’s Human Values Scale (HVS), as adapted for the ESS, to investigate whether values as defined by Schwartz serve as good predictors of the care for nature in selected CE countries. We also look at the correlation with respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics. Our analysis reveals that, while there are similarities regarding environmental attitudes and values among CE countries, there are also some individual differences. Croatia shows the strongest increase in the support for the care for nature over the 10-year period, and both Croatia and Slovenia score the highest on the care for nature in 2018. Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic show an overall stagnation in the results, while Hungary exhibits a significant decrease between 2008 and 2018. Our research in CE countries confirms that Schwartz’s HVS can be predictive of pro-environmentalism. However, while the findings for the higher-order value of Self-transcendence are in line with existing literature, the result suggesting that Conservatism is also a moderately good predictor of the care for nature is somewhat surprising. We posit that the reason could lie in the difference between collectivist vs. individualist value types, which provides a new dimension for the interpretation of environmental attitudes in these countries.

Ethnic return migration is a widespread strategy for migrants from economically disadvantaged countries. This article is about those ethnic return migrants who might successfully migrate thanks to their ancestors; their decision is based upon economic, pragmatic or rationalistic incentives aside from their diasporic feeling of belonging. Although this phenomenon has already been studied, scholars still mostly refer only to the benefits proposed by immigration policy as a key to understanding it. The impact of policy in the country of emigration on ethnic return migration is understudied. This article fills this gap. I found that when the Soviet Union introduced an attractive policy for Ukrainians/Russians in terms of study or work opportunities and the inhabitants in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic were quick to proclaim themselves as Ukrainians or Russians, the dissolution of the Soviet Union quickly changed this motivation. Ukrainians with Czech ancestors started to aim at obtaining official status as Czech members of the diaspora because of the benefits proposed by the Czech government (mainly permanent residency). However, it is difficult to prove the required link to one’s Czech ancestors due to Soviet-era documents in which the column with the Czech nationality of people’s ancestors is often missing. These observations lead to the conclusion that an attractive immigration policy aimed at the diaspora should not be treated as the only comprehensive explanation for ethnic return migration. Ethnic policy in the country of emigration also shapes this kind of migration and – in this concrete case – could even discourage ethnic return migrants.

This paper deals with the evaluation of changes in the labour force in the Czech Republic after 1989 and focuses on the branch and educational structure. The changes are also compared with processes in other countries of Central Europe. In the late 1980s the employment rate by sectors of the economy was different in Central European countries when compared with the situation in Western countries. Even subsequent transformation did not change the high share of industry and construction in total employment in the Czech Republic and Slovakia or a lower share of services. Within the manufacturing industry two stages can be distinguished. In the nineties, the majority of branches experienced a decrease in employment, whereas in the first decade of the 21st century stagnation or even reindustrialization occurred, especially when the branches associated with the automotive industry grew (other branches continued to decline). At the regional level, a diversification process was taking place all the time, if you like the transition from the specialization to the diversification. The importance of education is constantly increasing and the number of people with secondary education with GCE and tertiary education is growing. The relationship between the unemployment rate in districts of the Czech Republic and the share of employed people with tertiary education intensifies. The tertiary sector shows the highest level of education (in some branches of services more than onethird of employed has a tertiary education).

This paper aims to quantify the basic structure of gender wage gaps in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, using the EU-SILC 2008 dataset. The structure of the gender wage gap is analyzed based on the Heckman selection model and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The findings are to a great extent similar for the Czech and Slovak Republics. The observed gender wage gap is relatively high in these two countries, compared to Hungary and Poland. A relatively small but positive part of the observed gender wage gap can be explained by gender differences in characteristics in the Czech and Slovak Republics, with a high contribution of job characteristics. An opposite result proved in Hungary and Poland, where working women have on average even better characteristics than working men, mainly in terms of individual characteristics.

The paper seeks to analyse foreign direct investment and its impact on economic growth in the Central European macro-region, with an emphasis on the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Poland. The methodology applied in the first part involved comparative analysis of the trends in foreign investment and gross domestic product, and in the other, a growth model based on the Endogenous Growth Model. The construction of the model seeks to assess the impact of selected economic factors, including foreign direct investment, on the economic growth of transitional economies. The model employs a group of indicators, the gross domestic product per capita, volume of foreign direct investment per capita and gross fixed capital per capita, labour force growth and share of tertiary education graduates in the labour force. The analysis implied a great deal of spatial differentiation in the inflow of foreign investment and in economic growth. The highest volume of foreign direct investment per labour force is reported in Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic. The countries in this group are followed by Hungary and Slovakia, with Hungary displaying a marked decline in economic growth and investment attractiveness during recent years, and with Slovakia exhibiting the contrary trends to such an extent that Slovak economy has overtaken that of Hungary. The third group of countries contains Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia with the lowest volumes of foreign direct investment, where Lithuania nevertheless succeeded in sustaining a higher rate of growth of the gross domestic product. Poland also reported economic growth during the crisis years. In the second part, a growth model is compiled, which revealed that statistically significant relations exist between economic growth, labour force and investment growth. Growth of foreign direct investment positively demonstrates itself in increasing the rate of growth of the gross domestic product. As regards fixed capital formation, a higher growth will have an even more marked impact on the growth of the gross domestic product than was the case for foreign direct investment. Research confirms that each country is characterised by a different development trajectory in the field of economic growth and inflow of foreign investment. Foreign direct investment had an exceptional role to play in economic transformation as it contributed to the economic growth of Central and Eastern European countries and became a vehicle of integration for the transitional economies in global production chains.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.27.3.3914

The interface and interplay between inward and outward foreign direct investment (IFDI and OFDI), coupled with economic development, constitutes the essence of the Investment Development Path (IDP) paradigm, the central theoretical model in this study. In the context of this model, a comparative analysis is conducted of the IDPs of ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, all members of the European Union (EU). They include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This group of countries shows relative homogeneity in terms of sharing the same communist heritage, common experience in establishing and developing a market economy, and in acceding to the EU: with eight countries joining the EU in 2004 and two (Bulgaria and Romania) in 2007. All of these countries show relative homogeneity in terms of many socio-economic variables (Niroomand and Nissan, 2007) and have exhibited a tendency to economic convergence over the last two decades (Amplatz, 2003; Matkowski and Prochniak, 2007). At the same time though, there are considerable differences between them in their level of development and in completion of the transition process to the market-led system. In fact, one can distinguish more homogenous subregions in the CEE-10 group (see e.g. Caporale et al., 2009), namely the Central European countries (the CEE-5: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), the Baltic countries (the B-3: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), and the two Balkan countries located in south-eastern Europe (the SEE-2: Bulgaria and Romania).