Dear readers,
let me introduce this year’s second issue of ACTA VŠFS, which was prepared with careful selection and reviewing of the papers that had come to the editors’ desk. Before we get to the actual papers, I must mention that we also have got a new website of the journal (https://acta.vsfs.eu/), whose preparation and refinements took a lot of effort. I hope that the new web will help both the readers and the authors to enjoy the journal more and find easier and richer information about the journal itself and its review procedures, as well as its actual content. It is worth to take a look on this new website, and we hope the new structure will serve for many future issues of the journal.
Also, this issue is the first one which is done fully in English – up to now, we had Czech version of editorial and abstracts, too. But, since for a long time only papers in English have been submitted and published in our journal, the usage of Czech written items gradually lost their significance and we decided now to abandon them, making the journal in English language only.
In this issue, we have got five papers for you to look at and read. The first one, called “Environmental reporting and performance of Nigerian listed oil and gas firms”, came to the journal from far Africa and adopted an ex-post facto research design method using existing data from the financials of selected firms. The paper concludes that environmental accounting reporting contributed to the firms’ performance of Nigerian listed oil and gas firms. Therefore, these firms should be cost-effective and efficient when planning environmental activities to improve firms’ performance.
The second paper “Unemployment, effects of government measures and employment effects during the corona crisis in Germany” was written by the German author and returns to the topic that moved the world since the year 2020 – covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on macroeconomic aspects of employment during this epidemic in Germany. It also tackles the gender dimension of unemployment.
The third paper is focused on an evergreen topic for Czechia – the readiness to adopt the European single currency (“Readiness of the Czech Republic to join the euro area”). It pretty deeply analyses the factors and conditions for this process, including both fiscal and monetary criteria. Since the situation affecting the preparedness has been rapidly changing, there is a difficult task to trace the process and still maintain the constructive attitude against evaluating the possibilities to adopt the Euro rationally – but the authors have been successful in this task.
The fourth paper “The development of life insurance in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic” is as the name suggests devoted to insurance issues. The authors used quantitative methods to analyse the development of life insurance market in the two specified countries. Both positive and negative determinants have been found. The paper brings valuable findings about consumers’ behaviour on the life insurance market.
The fifth paper “Czech monetary and fiscal policies: big deficits and challenges” is a very interesting, logically argued and skilfully written research work about Czech fiscal and monetary policy challenges and possible pathways in current difficult environment. The author has a lifelong experience both with public and private finance and therefore his paper is well worth reading, even if some of his ideas may seem controversial or surprising at first sight. The paper brings suggestions for Czech tax policy too, consistent with other fiscal and monetary steps, and the analysis of Czech National Bank’s position within the current environment.
I hope that you will find this issue attractive and interesting, and I’m wishing you a good time reading it.
doc. Ing. Jan Mertl, Ph.D.
Executive Editor of ACTA VŠFS