F55 - International Institutional ArrangementsReturn

The article discusses which policies and to what extent should be financed from the EU budget and/or from the national budgets of the EU member states to satisfy the rationale and efficiency point of view. To answer these questions we discuss the existing approaches and apply the most relevant ones (in particular the theory of fiscal federalism and public sector economics) to examine the current structure of the EU budget expenditures. We conclude that there are few EU policies that would be more efficient if they were more fiscally centralized and there is a policy that should be brought down to national (regional) level.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and common commercial policy (CCP) on export performances of Visegrad group of countries (The Visegrad Four, V-4: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) preceding and following the EU accession. The V-4, before becoming the EU members, have participated actively in regionalism, signing free trade agreements and customs unions which often also resulted in the extended economic integration. But since the EU accession in 2004, all RTAs of the new members were no longer valid as these countries became the parties of the CCP of the EU. To analyse whether CCP was beneficial on the export performances of the V-4 countries, we estimate the augmented gravity model by employing Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator for time periods before and after the EU accession, in 1999-2003 and 2004-2013, respectively.

New Regionalism differs markedly from previous development of regional integration. These changes are connected mainly to the necessity of regionalism to react to changing global conditions, new world political order and entrance of new actors into regional integration (i.e. states and superpowers that did not take part in previous waves at all or on a limited scale, i.e. China). This applies also for the transforming countries, at which the regionalism can be observed as late as in its third wave during the 1990s (which applies for the Central and Eastern Europe as well as for the Commonwealth of Independent States' countries) or even later (which applies for China). The aim of this paper is to compare the role of the New Regionalism in most eminent cases in the three parts of the transforming region: in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Commonwealth of Independent States' region and in East Asia. As cases, the Czech Republic, Russia and China were selected, which should enable the study of not only regional aspects, but also selected global impacts of regionalism.