Research background: The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the world in the first quarter of 2020, has impacted almost every area of people's lives. Many states have introduced varying degrees of measures to prevent its spread. Most of these measures were, or still are, aimed at reducing or completely stopping the operation of shops and services, or in some cases, also the large manufacturing companies. However, as many companies have failed to cope with these restrictions, unemployment has risen in almost all EU countries. A similar situation was also observed in Slovakia, where the mentioned measures also had a significant impact on unemployment. Purpose of the article: In this study, we deal with the quantification of the impact of a pandemic, or more precisely, anti-pandemic measures, on the development of the registered unemployment rate in Slovakia. Methods: This quantification is based on the counterfactual method of before-after comparison, which is one of the most widely used methods in the field of impact assessments and brings very accurate results, based on real data. In the analysis, we use officially published data on the unemployment rate in Slovakia during the years 2013?2020 on a monthly basis. Such a long time series, using statistical methods of its decomposition and modelling of its trend, will allow predicting the development of the unemployment rate in Slovakia, assuming a counterfactual situation of no pandemic, and compare this development with the actual situation that occurred during 2020. Findings & Value added: The study results indicate an increase in the unemployment rate in Slovakia during 2020 by 2?3% compared to the trend of its development, which would have occurred without a pandemic. Given the counterfactual method used, this difference can be described as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the study can be used in practice in the design and implementation of measures introduced to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic on unemployment and, in the long-term perspective, also to eliminate these effects as much as possible. It can also be used as a theoretical tool in conducting impact assessments, which have so far been carried out very rarely in Slovakia.

Research background: Savings of households are accumulated as a result of individual propensity to save. Simultaneously, they provide the sources of financing investments in the economy through financial institutions as intermediaries in the flow of funds, between entities with a surplus and those with a demand for them.
 Purpose of the article: The paper aims at indicating the changes in the structure of house-holds’ financial savings in Poland in the period 2003–2015, as well as at exploring them as a source of financing the activities of other sectors through institutional mechanisms of the financial system.
 Methods: Intersectoral financial flows were estimated using input-output methods for com-piling “sector by instrument” tables of financial assets and liabilities into “sector by sector” matrices of intersectoral flows of each financial instrument. The research is based on statistical data published in the Eurostat database, i.e. annual accounts — financial balance sheets by institutional sectors and subsectors. The role of households’ financial savings in the network of intersectoral linkages in the financial system has been examined on the basis of financial input-output model.
 Findings & Value added: The comparison of the significance of particular institutional sectors’ supply of funds clearly indicates that the increase in households’ financial assets causes the largest increase in financial flows both as a result of direct effect and indirect effects reflecting the size of these flows’ feedback in the financial system. The study presented herein is the first application of the input-output approach for the Polish financial system. The idea of financial input-output model proposed by Tsujimura & Mizoshita (2003) is extended to disaggregate intersectoral flows in the form of individual financial instruments.

The main objective of the paper is to investigate properties of business cycles in the Polish economy before and after the recent crisis. The essential issue addressed here is whether there is statistical evidence that the recent crisis has affected the properties of the business cycle fluctuations. In order to improve robustness of the results, we do not confine ourselves to any single inference method, but instead use different groups of statistical tools, including non-parametric methods based on subsampling and parametric Bayesian methods. We examine monthly series of industrial production (from January 1995 till December 2014), considering the properties of cycles in growth rates and in deviations from long-run trend. Empirical analysis is based on the sequence of expanding-window samples, with the shortest sample ending in December 2006. The main finding is that the two frequencies driving business cycle fluctuations in Poland correspond to cycles with periods of 2 and 3.5 years, and (perhaps surprisingly) the result holds both before and after the crisis. We, therefore, find no support for the claim that features (in particular frequencies) that characterize Polish business cycle fluctuations have changed after the recent crisis. The conclusion is unanimously supported by various statistical methods that are used in the paper, however, it is based on relatively short series of the data currently available.

The recent turmoil in the euro area once more forces the EU authorities to reconsider the future of further monetary integration. One of the most commonly used criteria for successful monetary integration in contemporary research is business cycle synchronization (BCS). Though BCS has been vastly described at country level, not as much attention has been paid to the degree of BSC at regional level. The topic is important for two main reasons. Firstly, determining the degree of BCS at the regional level can help in the assessment of monetary policy effectiveness on the country level, as well as give a point of reference for evaluation of prospective costs of participation in a monetary union. Secondly, there is a theoretical dispute within the optimum currency areas literature between the ‘European Commission’ and the ‘Krugman’ view that can be resolved to a large extent trough regional analysis. In order to assess BCS in the EU, Hodrick-Prescott, as well as Christiano and Fitzgerald filter to time series of real GDP for 24 countries, 82 NUTS 1, 242 NUTS 2 and 1264 NUTS 3 regions over the period between 1998 and 2010. The data was later used to create bilateral measures of BSC, which gave 276 observations on the country level, 3321 on NUTS 1, 29161 on NUTS 2 and 798216 on NUTS 3 level. The results of the analysis support the ‘European Commission’ view and show a very high degree of BSC within EU countries. The country level analysis also reveals that within the EU there is a group of countries that could form an effectively working monetary union based on the BCS criterion.

Fiscal governance is defined as a combination of institutions, rules and norms that structure good governance in the area of fiscal policy. It can be named as the specific mechanism of coordination by using of tools such as: budgetary procedures (legislative fiscal rules), fiscal rules (numerical) and independent fiscal institutions/ fiscal councils. Fiscal governance focuses on how the fiscal policy is planned, approved, conducted and monitored, including the involvement of not only public bodies, but the business sector and civil society too. In this study, particular attention was paid to capturing the essence of the relationship between the qualitative elements of fiscal councils activity and its impact on stabilizing the public finances in the view of fiscal governance concept. During the last world crisis in the EU countries, an interest in establishing fiscal councils has increased. Before 2008 there were only seven institutions in the EU, while in 2014 there are already 19. The question is - are these institutions efficient in stabilizing public finances? Therefore, the main objective of the article is the assessment of the role of the fiscal councils in the coordination of the fiscal policy in the EU Member States. The conducted analysis verifies this role on the basis of theoretical deliberation of the current state of the art. The empirical research verifies fiscal councils’ dependence on fiscal balance of EU countries. Research was conducted on the basis of the European Commission, Eurostat and International Monetary Fund data sets.

The experience of Japan from the 90s of the twentieth century and the recent global financial crisis has shown that the zero lower bound problem has ceased to be a theoretical curiosity and became the subject of intense scientific discussion. This issue is closely linked with John Maynard Keynes’s liquidity trap. The phenomenon of the zero lower bound is very controversial. Not all economists agree that it may restrict the effectiveness of the central bank’s actions. The aim of the article is to present the views of economists on this transmission mechanism of monetary policy under the zero lower bound. The paper also attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policy at zero nominal interest rates.

Tax sharing arrangements provide considerable financial resources to sub-central government levels. This statement is true both for unitary and federal states although tax revenue sharing mechanisms differ significantly across countries. The basic aim of this article is to compare the mechanisms adopted in Germany and in Poland. It assesses the degree of tax autonomy granted to sub-central government levels in the countries analysed, overviews the principles of apportionment of joint (shared) taxes and presents statistics on tax revenue composition of sub-central government levels.

Fiscal policy, including its expenditure aspect, is often discussed and analysed from a variety of angles in the literature on public finances, undoubtedly due to the major importance of this topic. However, not all areas of the expenditure part of fiscal policy have been subjected to in-depth analysis. One of the less discussed tools of fiscal policy consists of general purpose transfers, which are a certain type of expenditure passed from the central budget to local governments. This study focuses on presenting the systems for subsidising sub-national governments in selected European countries and evaluating, based on a synthetic measure, the fiscal policies of France, Italy, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland and Finland implemented by means of general transfers, with the aim of identifying the best fiscal policy with respect to subsidising and the characteristic features determining its success. The method of unitisation of statistical feature values was employed in this study to enable comparative analysis. As suggested by the results of the analysis, spanning the years 2003–2012, the highest-ranked fiscal policy implemented via general-purpose transfers has been developed in the Netherlands.

Inflation expectations, both their median and dispersion, are of great importance to the effectiveness of monetary policy. The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of the global financial crisis on dispersion of inflation expectations in the European Union. Using European Commission’s survey data, we find that in the early phase of the crisis the dispersion dropped rapidly but then, after Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the trend reversed and these fluctuations cannot be explained by movements of inflation rates and other commonly used factors. We also observe that, in the new European Union member states, the initial drop of the dispersion was weaker whereas the subsequent rise was stronger as compared to the old member states.

This paper compares the periods before and after the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 from the perspective of market microstructure. The hypothesis is that the crisis influenced the fragile Russian financial market equilibrium. As financial markets adapt to the new equilibrium, the paper studies the effects of the crisis and the imposition of economic sanctions on Russia in terms of volatility, duration, prices and volume for selected joint stock companies listed on the U.S. and the Russian stock markets. Results reveal that the Moscow Stock exchange lacks an appropriate transmission mechanism from informed investors to the rest of the market.