This diploma thesis allows getting complex summary about important aspects of tax theory with special focus on excise taxes. The thesis is an analysis of excise tax on alcoholic beverages and tobacco products in the Czech Republic in the years 2000-2015. The analysis includes an assessment of the impact of rates increase of specific excise taxes on the state budget, the consumption of selected products and the number of detected tax evasions. The thesis demonstrated a positive correlation between the increase in excise taxes and revenues from alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. Increasing rates but also leads to a decrease in consumption of these products and has an impact on the number of detected cases of tax evasions in the area of excise taxes.

Tax-setting policy belongs to the main duties of politicians from time immemorial. Since those times, people are questioning whether politicians, while setting taxes, are pursuing mainly interests of publi or their own. In this thesis, I am studying this question in the industry of alcoholic beverages, regulation of it's consumption and production. I am using two statistical models, simple model of partial equilibria and AIDS model (Almost Ideal Demand System), to estimate own price elasticity of demand for beer, wine and spirits in selected post-soviet countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russian Federation. Linear model with mixed effects is estimated to uncover the strength and direction of dependency of alcohol policy on own price elasticity of demand for alcoholic beverages in the above mentioned countries. Results show, that politicians of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania and Russian Federation set the alcohol policy in accordance with maximization of tax revenue hypothesis, while Latvians seems to be rather vote maximizers. I have expected the politicians in Baltic states to behave similar and also least populistically from studied countries. But my expectations were not fulfilled.

The subject of this diploma thesis is to analyze the system of taxation of alcoholic beverages in the Scandinavian countries. The main aim of this thesis is to compare the taxation of alcoholic beverages in the Nordic countries with taxation in the rest of the European Union. The first part is theoretical and focuses on defining the concepts of tax competition, tax harmonization and coordination. It also includes harmonization of excise duties on alcoholic beverages based on the Directives of the European Union. The second part relates to the consumption of alcoholic beverages and deals with the historical aspect, changes in consumption patterns and the level of consumption in the Nordic countries. The third part deals with the taxation of alcoholic beverages, its development and differences in the Nordic countries compared with other countries of the European Union. In the second and the third part is carried out data analysis through statistical hypothesis testing and calculation of the coefficient of variation. The fourth part contains the evaluation. The thesis is peformed using descriptive, research, analytical and comparative methods and methods of mathematical statistics. The main outcome of this thesis is the finding that in all kinds of examined alcohol except spirits there is a different (for still wine and intermediate products even very different) level of taxation in the Nordic countries and other countries of the European Union.

Thesis deals with problems in legal as well as non legal regulations of alcohol usage in Czech Republic. I analyse the development of laws and current version of legal regulations on alcohol availability for young people in Czech Republic. I compare the Czech legislative to legislative in other countries. I analyse different approach to alcohol drinking in varied societies. During work on the diploma thesis, the Czech government declared a prohibition on alcohol trade. I evaluate the Czech approach and compare this prohibition with prohibitions in other countries. Finally, I evaluate Czech regulations of alcohol advertisments, and describe several court decisions (and self-regulatory board decisions) in alcohol advertising. The aim of thesis is to find the positive and negative aspects of legal and non-legal regulations in individual countries and propose new solutions to current alcohol problems.

This work is about a realistic visualization technique called raytracing. It studies its original form, its extensions and optimizations. Raytracing casts rays through pixels and follows their propagation in the scene, according to the physical laws. It enables rendering of correct shadows, reflections and refractions. Distributed raytracing serves for better visualization and advanced effects. One ray is replaced with a beam of rays that allows soft shadows, fuzzy translucency, depth of field and antialiasing. With the increasing number of rays, the render time rises as well, so it is needed to use some optimization techniques and tools. A way of using this rendering method for visualization of alcoholic beverages is also described.