The core of thesis lays in quantitative analysis of microeconomic data on public procurement and alternative forms of dealing with public money. It consists of three essays with one common attribute: extensive groundwork with data, including overlaps into legal and technical disciplines. The fist essay examines the relationship between transparency of ownership structure and (i) profits of firms winning public procurement contracts and (ii) competition for the contracts and savings of the public authority. It identifies a significant advantage of firms with opaque ownership structure in terms of access to public money. It concludes with a possible explanation of conflict of interest and corruption, which might channel such advantages. The second essay proposes and tests a novel methodology for benchmarking of contracting authorities. The proposed rating measures a deviation from best practice recommendations in the areas of openness, competition and transparency. Indirectly it measures efficiency and corruption potential in public procurement. The pilot results of the methodology are provided and extensively discussed for a group of Czech municipalities. Third essay investigates issue of crowding out effect potentially introduced by EU funds provision. It studies direct budgetary impacts of...

The presented thesis deals with abilities of municipalities in the region NUTS II South - East to draw European funds. The aim is to analyze how well - informed are municipalties about this topic and how they can take advantage of their gained knowledge and use the financial instruments of the EU. Administrative division founded by the EU is needed for a possibility of a member state to use European funds. NUTS II South - East region covers two Czech regions - Jihomoravský a Vysočina - and it is also a region with the highest number of municipalities from all the NUTS II regions in the Czech Republic. Municipalities are one of the most active applicants for the European funds and their knowledge and abilities to use the funds is important. According to a Theory of learning regions there were set three criteria which created the basis of the research. Knowledge and abilities were divided into three phases depending on when the municipalities deal with them during the process of withdrawing. For gaining data for the research I used the mixed methods research that combine the quantitative and the qualitative research. Firstly there was a questionnaire among all municipalities in the region and then I have done interviews with five representatives of selected municipalities - Milotice, Švábov, Třebíč,...

This PhD thesis looks at one of the most crucial determinants of state formation, quality of institutions, and social equality: institutionalised grand corruption. Institutionalised grand corruption denotes the particularistic allocation of public resources, that is violating prior explicit rules in order to benefit a closed network while denying access to all others. Emphasizing access to power and public resources deviates from traditional definitions of corruption resting on individual wrongdoing and abuse of power. The thesis makes use of large amounts of administrative data describing public procurement tenders on transaction level and links it to data on company ownership, financial accounts, and political office of company owners. By using data mining techniques it breaks away from standard, and arguably deficient, measures of quality of institutions and corruption. It proposes a complex ‘blueprint’ for measuring institutionalized grand corruption in the allocation of public resources and applies its key elements to three Central and Eastern European countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. It is emphasized that these cases are only ‘pilot’ measurements, the blueprint is applicable to practically every high and middle income country, data is typically going back in time for 6-8 years. Using such a novel indicator set allows for an unprecedented detail of analysis. Results highlight the role played by European Union Structural and Cohesion Funds in increasing the prevalence of institutionalised grand corruption. This is due to at least two factors, first, they provide additional public resources available for corrupt rent extraction; second, they change the motivations for and controls of corruption. In Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, the first effect increases the value of particularistic resource allocation by up to 1.21% of GDP, while the second effect decreases it by up to 0.03% of GDP. The latter effect is entirely driven by Slovakia; in Czech Republic and Hungary even this effect increases particularism.

The topic of thesis "Support from EU funds for biomass usage in the location of the town of Třeboň" is a analysis of the biomass potential in selected area with a source of energy project. The first part was focused on the importance of renewabla resources of energy and their supporting by EU and Czech Republic. In the second part was presented the analysis of biomass potential, and this part was given the energy project with economic evaluation.

This thesis is focusing on corruption and misuse of financial funds from European Union. It primarily analyses Regional Operation Programme North-West (ROP Severozápad), which ended with massive corruption affair. The affair lead to the suspension of payments from the European Union, change of assignment of projects in the next programme period, but also opened the question of current trends in corruption in the Czech Republic. The main aim of the thesis was to identify the most dangerous spots that lead to misuse of European funds, connect the corruption affair with current corruption trends in the Czech Republic and suggest basic activities that could prevent the misuse of European subsidies in the future. The aim was achieved via analysis of the operation programme, that ran through the years 2007-2013. It was discovered, that the system was purpose-built so that the local politicians could manipulate with the order of winning projects and thus unfairly distribute the financial funds from the European Union.

Subject of this thesis "Analysis of the Possibility to Draw Financial Means on the European Union's Funds for the Financing of Developing Activities in Municipalities, a concrete manifestation on an example of a municipality (town)" is to find to what extent towns look after their area development and how they use the possibility to draw financial means from the EU funds. The first part tackles the status of a municipality at present and possibilities of changes. The second part deals with the town's economy; the third focuses on possibilities of drawing subsidies at various levels of public administration to fund development activities of towns, mainly through EU funds. On those theoretical grounds, development potential of a concrete town is analysed and in consequence, future development activities and their possibility is explored.

The thesis aims to analyze European funds promoting tourism in the Czech Republic, and to assess the extent to which the Czech Republic was able to take advantage of this support. The intention is to introduce current possibilities of using EU funds and analyze how effective implementation was. The work is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is devoted to regional policy and the instruments through which it is implemented. The second chapter deals with the Implementation process of EU funds at European and national level. The last chapter analyzes data focused on financial support to the tourism development in the period of 2007-2013, and 2014-2020.

At the beginning of the thesis I'm focusing on global aspect of subsidies and transportation. These two items play important role in economic integration processes. I'm explaining their importance in context which is not well known. Further there is a description of EU transport policy. After that I'm researching the relation of transport infrastructure among macroeconomics and environment at EU-27 level. In the middle of the thesis there is the analysis of subsidies possibilities for Czech Republic after joining the EU till present. I'm also describing the transport infrastructure of Zlín Region to analyze the way of invested subsidies to transport infrastructure. In the main part of thesis there is the analysis of used subsidies according to operational programmes with an aim at efficiency among NUTS 3 regions with summarizing conclusion. In the end of thesis I'm describing specific projects with regional and international impact. There is the explanation of necessity of these projects, programming connection with operational program, the composition of building structure, area of influence, impact on local economics and environment, financial aspects and traffic usage.

Work is focused on analyzing exigence of municipalities in the elaboration of projects financed by EU funds and to identify problems in small villages to the processing of such projects. The first step will analyze and assess the system of drawing EU funds in the Czech Republic, then make a direct processing of cost-benefit analysis of the selected project. In the third step I use a questionnaire, in which will be identified the problems which face the municipalities and how they solve these problems.

The presented master thesis focuses on the topical issue of Croatian Accession to the European Union that took a place on July 1, 2013. Croatia became the twenty-eighth member in the time of adverse economic situation in the old continent, especially in the monetary union -- Eurozone, which problems spread all over the Union. The aim of this thesis is to describe the course of the process and evaluate and analyze possible impacts and benefits for both parties. The thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter informs about political background of the state and economical development. The second chapter describes the process itself and its aspects, whereas in the third chapter the author evaluates possible impacts and benefits of the accession.