Wealth, well-being and the standard of living of the population are among the most important topics of economic policy and statistics. This diploma thesis deals with statistical concepts of wealth measurement, especially the wealth of households. The aim of the thesis is to introduce various indicators that deal with the mentioned issues. This thesis will describe Gross Domestic Product, Household Consumption, EU-SILC Survey, or Alternative Indicators Assessing the Living Standard of the Population. The most important indicator characterizing the wealth of households will be the net worth of households. On the presented indicators I will describe the development of wealth of households in the Czech Republic since 1993. Another part of the thesis is focused on describing the relationship between net worth and other indicators of wealth through cointegration analysis of time series. In this cointegration analysis, the ADL model and the EC model will be used. The last part of the thesis is aimed at the international comparison of the wealth of households within selected European countries. For this comparison will be use a cluster analysis to build clusters of states with a similar household wealth.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to cover the catching up with the economic level among the countries of middle and eastern Europe. More accurately it analyses GDP per capita and household income per capita as one of the key economic indicators. The thesis concretely focuses on analysis of beta and sigma convergence and cluster analysis of the mentioned regions and concurrently at the background of the analysis explains some theoretical terms from areas of economics, econometrics and statistics. The analysis was concluded in IBM SPSS programme which belongs to the most complex, user friendly and professionally often used expert tools. The data for the analysis were used from Eurostat.

The thesis considers lifestyle with emphasis on its applicability in marketing practices. The first part characterises the social research projects that took place recently in the Czech Republic. The second part concentrates on the principles and methods of market segmentation, followed by an example of financial market segmentation based on features of lifestyle. The final part contains recommendations related to marketing strategies towards chosen segments.

The current age is characterised by unprecedented information growth, whether it is by amount or complexity. Most of it is available in digital form so we can analyze it using cluster analysis. We have tried to classify the documents from 20 Newsgroups collection in terms of their content only. The aim was to asses available clustering methods in a variety of applications. After the transformation into binary vector representation we performed several experiments and measured the values of entropy, purity and time of execution in application CLUTO. For a small number of clusters the best results offered the direct method (generally hierarchical method), but for more it was the repeated bisection (divisive). Agglomerative method proved not to be suitable. Using simulation we estimated the optimal number of clusters to be 10. For this solution we described in detail features of each cluster using repeated bisection method and i2 criterion function. In the future focus should be set on realisation of binary clustering with advantage of programming languages like Perl or C++. Results of this work might be of interest to web search engine developers and electronic catalogue administrators.

Work provides an overview of the major demographic indicators, the Czech Republic and the European Union. The first part, the reader may meet with some key demographic data and looking at history in obtaining such data. The second part describes the development of the population of the Czech Republic during the years after World War II until 2008. Further the thesis focuses on the demographics of the Member States of the Union during the years 1990 to 2007. The last part deals with the cluster analysis of EU member states, which is an effort based on life expectancy in 2002 and 2007 to assess the status of the Czech Republic in the EU. The aim should be to work groups and comparing selected demographic indicators for Czech Republic and the European Union.

The diploma thesis explores with the evaluation of the success of selected indices for determining the number of clusters used in cluster analysis. The aim of this thesis is on the basis of various combinations of clustering methods and distances verify whether, alternatively using which clustering methods and distances is it possible to rely on the results of indices for determining the number of clusters. The results of success rate presented in the third chapter suggest that not all of indices for determining the number of clusters can be used universally. The most successful index is Dunn index, which was able to determine the correct number of clusters in 37 % of cases, respectively Davies-Bouldin index with the share of 70 % when including deviation of one cluster. The success rate is affected by both used method and selected distance.

Dissertation follows up cluster analysis of European Union states using social and economical indicators. In the first part all the social and economical indicators are defined. In the second part of the dissertation all these indicators in time of economical and financial and later debt crisis in years from 2007 to 2012 in European Union states are analysed. In the third part the cluster analysis is applicated for the social and economical indicators of the European Union states. Five clusters were identified using cluster analysis. Structure of these clusters was changing during years 2007 and 2012. First cluster contained developed Western European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Sweden and United Kingdom). The second cluster was created from countries, that entered to European Union after year 2004 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia). The third cluster contained Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia. In the fourth cluster were Southern European countries Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Malta and the fifth cluster contained only Luxembourg.

Unemployment is a common phenomenon in economy. The unemployment rate is an indicator reflecting the economic situation significantly. Unemployment is followed by the public intensively and that is why it is an important political topic. To fight unemployment it is necessary to analyze its current state, development and estimated future prospects. This thesis is focused on analysis of the state and development of unemployment in the Czech Republic and EU. Its future development is estimated using the Box-Jenkins method.

Main goal of this thesis is to analyze human development index for European countries and provide cluster analysis not only of human development index but even of another quality of life variables and to find similarities between particular countries by using hierarchical methods. The first part focuses on quality of life and definition of human development index. Human development index is one possibility how to measure quality of life, there are mentioned another possibilities, though how to analyze it. The second part of the thesis focuses on cluster analysis definition, which is used for searching for similarities between particular countries. Five hierarchical cluster methods is used for classify countries into clusters. Euclidean metric is used for express the distance between countries. Similar variables between countries is judged according to sorting into clusters by hierarchical methods. Diploma thesis enlightens similarity between European countries from quality of life overview and provides statistical evidence about this topic. Results of the thesis confirms similarities between geographical close states.

This work is aimed to determine whether the Czech Republic is ready to enter to the third stage of European economic and monetary union which is associated with the adoption of the euro, and that regarding the fulfillment of the formal entry criteria and also in terms of alignment of the Czech economy with the rest of the eurozone. On that basis evaluate whether it is advantageous for the country to adopt the euro. The first part introduces the different stages of regional integration, as well as the theory of optimum currency areas and economic governance in the European Union. The second chapter is devoted to evaluate the readiness of the Czech Republic to join the euro zone from three perspectives. First, fulfillment of nominal convergence criteria is evaluated. Real convergence and macroeconomic imbalances within the euro area are assessed using cluster analysis. The second approach is to analyze whether EMU constitute an optimal currency area. At the end the experience, of three countries of the eastern enlargement, with changeover to a common currency are presented.