INVESTMENT INCENTIVES IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Abstract

Investment incentives were originally created particularly to support the inflow of foreign capital into transforming economies. Today, they are also available in the developed countries of Western Europe, where they no longer fulfil their primary function but have become a standard and popular economic policy tool allowing the government to emphasise its impact on the country’s positive economic development (e.g., falling unemployment and reductions in unemployment benefits or recovery of public finance). Like any comprehensive system, the system of investment incentives has its supporters and opponents who cannot agree on their justification. The question is, whether they are efficient from the point of view of the government, as their provider. This is even more prevalent if the given investment was realised without investment support. Using the data of investment incentives provided by CzechInvest and selected macroeconomic indicators (Czech Statistical Office), as well as regression analysis of time series dependences, the aim of this paper is to verify the impact of investment supported by incentives (independent variables) on the macroeconomic climate of the Czech Republic (dependent variables) from 1998 to 2019. Based on the research findings, investment incentives cannot be described as an effective economic policy tool that clearly leads to the regions’ economic development. They contribute to an inflow of investments into (not only) structurally problematic regions (i.e., with higher unemployment or a lower economic level), but the positive impact of these investments on the macroeconomic climate is statistically negligible – not only at the regional level (NUTS 3), but also at the level of the whole economy (NUTS 1). In addition, the question remains as to whether or not the supported investments in the given region would have been implemented without the possibility of using incentives.