P26 - Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Political Economy; Property RightsReturn

Democratically set ownership rights are the basic premise for a fully functioning liberal market economy. The restitution processes in the Czech Republic should have played an important role in rectifying the abuse of ownership rights during the period of the centrally-planned economy. Unfortunately, the asymmetries of the church restitutions, as the last process which should have been part of the rectification, i.e. the restoration of democratic ownership rights in the Czech Republic, became the catalyst for new injustices and grievances in relation to ordinary entitled persons to whom other restitution laws also applied.
In light of the above, this article contains an analysis of the restitutions of agricultural and forest assets and an analysis of church restitutions. The results of these analyses are compared in order to confirm the hypothesis that church restitutions were given preference over ordinary entitled persons. The conclusion to the article shows this to be fully in accordance with basic economic theories.

O. R. Lange, a Polish economist, statistician, econometrician, sociologist, politician and diplomat was classified as a reformist Marxist. He became famous for studies on planning and socialist economies. Lange demonstrates and proves the possibility of the existence of an effective socialist system. He also analyzed capitalist economy, e.g., the issue of cyclical fluctuations and unemployment.

The main objective of the paper is to identify and quantify the influence of institutional environment on inflows of foreign direct investment in European post-socialist countries and countries of Latin America. The reference period is the period 1996-2012 due to data availability. The World Bank Governance Matters concept is used as the basic indicator of institutional environment. Panel data regression analysis is used for the identification and quantification purposes. According to the results, the influence of institutional environment on FDI is not entirely unequivocal in the European transition economies, but it is statistically significant in the Latin American countries. Furthermore, there are statistically significant areas - quality of democracy and government effectiveness - in the post-socialist countries, and all the institutional areas except the level of democracy in Latin America, mainly regulatory quality and rule of law.