Differences in patients motivating factors influence their attitudes towards the role and quality of tourism agents’ services. This paper identified three major components (treatment-related, economic and travel-related) that explain patients motivation to travel for treatment. The study can help medical tourism agents to refine their marketing strategies and suggest the proper incentives to encourage participation in medical tourism. The research was made on the basis of a critical analysis of scientific literature, surveys and analyses.
The problem of governments’ over-indebtedness is one of the most important challenges for today’s EMU governance. As numbers suggest, the problem of extensive deficits has appeared in the EMU long before the burst of the global financial crisis. We suspect that the membership in a currency area might be partially blamed for such progression of indebtedness. This paper examines the determinants of government risk premiums in the EU Member States to answer if the risk premium assigned by the market may give currency area Member States additional incentives for profligacy. Controlling other factors, we investigate the pattern in which fiscal deficits and GDP growth affect the yield of 10-year-maturity government bonds in the euro area and the non-euro area EU Member States. Our results are straightforward. The market penalizes EU countries that do not belong to the euro area for bad economic performance and extensive deficits from 4 to 7 times stronger. Our estimates confirm the strong impact of the common credibility problem in the EMU but also support the key role of financial stress in determining the cost of government debt.
In this paper we present a copula-based model for a binary and a continuous variable in a time series setup. Within this modeling framework both marginals can be equipped with their own dynamics whereas the contemporaneous dependence between both processes can be flexibly captured via a copula function. We propose a method for testing the goodness-of-fit of such a time series model using probability integral transforms (PIT). This verification procedure allows not only a verification of the goodness-of-fit of the estimated marginal distribution for a continuous variable but also the conditional distribution of a continuous variable given the outcome of its binary counterpart (i.e. the adequacy of the copula choice). We test the model on an empirical example: investigating the relationship between trading volume and the indicators of arbitrarily ’large’ price movements on the interbank EUR/PLN spot market.
Over the past two years, coking coal prices have been the most volatile among major bulk commodities. On the supply side, the most important factor determining the movement of coal prices were weather problems affecting the exports of coal from Australia (Queensland), where the production of the best quality coking coals is concentrated. On the demand side, an important factor is the growing role of China on the market, which, being the world’s largest producer and consumer of metallurgical coal, has also become its largest importer. The dominant, about 75% share of China in the global spot market has resulted in their level of activity influencing the periodic price decreases or increases in international trade and prices based on CFR China (along with Australian FOB prices) have become important indicators to monitor market trends and determine levels of negotiated benchmarks. The exceptional volatility on the market led to a change in the quarterly price fixing mechanism for hard-load hard coal contractors in mid–2017 to apply a formula that assumes the valuation of their quarterly volumes based on the average of the basket of spot price indices. This reflects the broader trend of the evolving market, with growing spot market activity. The article describes the current situation on the international coking coal market and presents short-term forecasts for hard coking hard coal prices (PHCC LV), which are a reference point for fixing prices of other types of metallurgical coal (hard standard, semi-soft, PCI).
Over the past decade, the growing demand for imported coal from consumers (mainly Asian) coincided with supply constraints on the part of major suppliers. The sequence of events is referred to as force majeure. There were many events in the exporting countries, mainly including the cyclone and floods in Australia (Queensland, the world’s largest hard coking coal mining region). Imbalance between supply and demand causes commodity prices to be subject to cyclical changes, but in recent years the frequency and dynamics of these changes in the international metallurgical market (hard coking coal, semi-soft coking coal, PCI coal) has been extremely high. China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of coking coal, played a leading role in these events. Political action by the Chinese authorities regarding their domestic mining and metallurgical industries and the coke-chemical industry has made the country dethrone Japan since 2013 and has become a global leader in metallurgical coal imports. The rise of China’s importance in coal trading has become an important benchmark for monitoring market trends and benchmarking benchmarks. The market has become more bipolar and CFR China’s prices (in addition to Australia’s FOB prices). The paper describes the path of pricing mechanism changes in international trade contracts for metallurgical coal, against the background of market conditions that generate these changes.
Energy is a basic industry for any economy and ensures the country’s security, including economic
security. The purpose of the article is to analyze the reform of the energy sector in Ukraine
for successful integration into the energy sector of the European Union. The state of the energy
industry from 2003 to 2018 is analyzed. The following main reasons for the decrease in electricity
generation in Ukraine are identified – a decrease in production volumes, the annexation of Crimea
and the anti-terrorist operation in the east of Ukraine, a decrease in the volume of energy output
from Thermal Power Plants due to aging capacities, difficulties with raw materials, low efficiency,
which, however, has a good effect on the environment due to a decrease carbon dioxide emissions.
The directions of reforming the electric power industry of Ukraine are considered in the context of
“industry-market-company”. Four electricity market models are analyzed and the new model of the
competitor’s market for electricity in Ukraine with contract market, spot market, the balancing market
is substantiated. The structure of the segments of the new electricity market and the participants
are proposed. More than half of the electricity market is provided by nuclear power, which ranks
the 5th in the world in terms of installed capacity. The analysis of the performance indicators of the
nuclear company for 2007–2019 showed significant reserves for the company’s growth, which are
being successfully implemented through strategic development projects and phased corporatization
of the company as a tool of unbundling. The main challenges of implementation a new market
model are analyzed and solutions are proposed.
The paper presents a global perspective of the current technologies used for steel production and the steel markets. The iron and steel industry is a very complex sector that is strongly related with the rest of the economy due to the importance of steel products for industries such as construction, automotive, and other manufacturing sectors. Moreover, the iron and steel industry demands significant amounts of raw materials and energy, and most companies producing raw materials are located remote from the areas of highest steel demand. In consequence, both steel products and inputs are traded internationally (mostly by sea) and in large quantities, what additionally complicates analyses of the iron and steel industry. Steel prices depend on several variables, and there is not a single price for steel since there is a great variety of steel products traded. Those prices depend on supply and demand interaction (between steel producers and consumers, but also on interaction with other industries competing for the same inputs), and on transport conditions. As concerns the ownership structure, the steel industry consists of some large firms that operate globally and produce significant output, and many small firms that operate at a lesser scale. Recently, some of those firms have consolidated into large multinationals (such as ArcelorMittal, formed in 2006 by the merger of Arcelor and Mittal Steel, Arcelor being the result of the previous merger of Aceralia (ES), Usinor (FR), and Arbed (LX) in 2002). The results of this article form the basis for further long- and mid-term analyses of the development of the global steel industry. The main conclusion of the paper is that any future analysis of the iron and steel industry should be based on quantitative modelling tools that: (i) properly capture the technological diversity of the industry and the key features of the supply chain, (ii) are able to consider the strategic behaviour of all the key players of the industry, and (iii) consider all those factors at the global scale.
The paper investigates the supply structure of the capacity market in Poland in the coming years. The results of the capacity auctions conducted in 2018 are analyzed for this purpose. Three auctions were held at that time. The products traded in the capacity market are capacity obligations for the following years: 2021, 2022 and 2023. The auctions were organized in accordance with (i) he Act of December 8, 2017 on the Capacity Market and the (ii) Capacity Market Regulations published by the Polish Power Grid. The source of data used in this study is the official information of the President of the Energy Regulatory Office on the final results of the main auctions for 2021–2023 delivery periods. The list of the capacity suppliers who won capacity auctions contains the type of capacity market units, the volume of capacity obligations, the duration of capacity agreements and the business name of the capacity suppliers. The conducted analysis indicates that the auction for 2021 was won mainly by existing units (45.81%) and refurbishing units (33.51%). In subsequent years, the share of existing generating units is significantly higher and amounts to 91.67% for 2022 and 84.54% for 2023. The results of the study carried out in this paper also show that one energy company, being the owner of power generating daughter companies, has a very high share in these capacity auctions. The PGE Capital Group contracted 51.95% for 2021, 69.92% for 2022 and 64.44% for 2023 of the total capacity obligation. The volume amounts to over 70% of their total installed capacity.
The article presents the challenges faced by the hard coal mining sector in Poland. The biggest
challenge results from a decrease in the demand for coal, which was triggered mainly by the climate
policy, including the tightening of environmental standards and an increase in the efficiency of generating
units. The fundamental model of the MRÓWKA domestic coal market has been described.
The model allows for determining the marginal price of a given fuel for a given generating unit in
the system and the optimal mix of fuels to meet the energy demand. The results of the model calculations
for the baseline and alternative scenarios were presented. It has been shown that the optimal
distribution of coal mining capacities promotes the import of the discussed fuel in the north-eastern
part of the country and that the individual customer valuation leads to a decrease in the competitiveness
of the units located in the central-western part of the country. The paper also discusses the
potential impact of the domestic oversupply on the balance sheet and the price of coal. According
to the obtained results and the basic laws of economics, an oversupply of coal leads to a decrease
in prices. For the analyzed variants, the dependence of prices was estimated at PLN 0.0308 / GJ for
every million tons of the oversupply. The fall in prices is largely due to the fuel supply to units located
close to ports or railway border crossings. Based on the presented arguments it can be concluded
that the maximization of financial result from the extraction of coal should be based on an analysis
taking incremental changes in fuel prices into account.
The paper presents the impact of the reformed EU ETS (Emission Trading Scheme – ETS in
the European Union) on the currently operating market for trading in CO2 emission allowances.
The new Directive introduced a number of changes aimed at tightening the climate policy, which
the Polish energy sector based mainly on hard coal may mean an increase in the costs of electricity
production, and thus an increase in the cost of the entire economy.
The main goal of the changes is to achieve one of the objectives the European Union has set for itself,
i.e. the reduction of CO2 emissions by 40% until the year 2030. These assumptions are the result of
joint arrangements of the EU countries under the Paris Agreement on climate change adopted in 2015.
The Directive introduces a new market stability reserve mechanism (MSR) which, according to its
assumptions, is designed to ensure a demand and supply balance of the ETS. Bearing the balance in
mind, it means the reduction of excess allowances, which, although their number is decreasing, it is
decreasing to slowly according to EU legislators, still oscillating around 2 billion EUA.
The paper also draws attention to the rigorous assumptions adopted in the new Directive, aimed at
increasing the price of CO2, that is the costs in electricity production. Due to manually-controlled
prices, are we doomed to high CO2 prices and therefore the prices of electricity? What are its estimated
maximum levels? Will the new assumptions encourage the Member States to switch to lowcarbon
technologies? Can they weaken the economies of countries that are currently based mainly
on coal energy sources, and strengthen countries where green energy is developed?
In recent years, autoregressive conditional duration models (ACD models) introduced by Engle and Russell in 1998 have become very popular in modelling of the durations between selected events of the transaction process (trade durations or price durations) and modelling of financial market microstructure effects. The aim of the paper is to develop Bayesian inference for the ACD models. Different specifications of ACD models will be considered and compared with particular emphasis on the linear ACD model, Box-Cox ACD model, augmented Box-Cox ACD model and augmented (Hentschel) ACD model. The analysis will consider models with the Burr distribution and the generalized Gamma distribution for the innovation term. Bayesian inference will be presented and practically used in estimation of and prediction within ACD models describing trade durations. The MCMC methods including Metropolis-Hastings algorithm are suitably adopted to obtain samples from the posterior densities of interest. The empirical part of the work includes modelling of trade durations of selected equities from the Polish stock market.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI) have been long considered as independent forms of international capital flows. This paper analyzes the mutual relationship between FDI and FPI and attempts to answer the question whether they complement or substitute for each other from a foreign investor’s point of view. The paper describes the main characteristics of FDI and FPI in terms of their volatility and profitability. We analyze the long-run and short-run relationships between FDI and FPI using vector error correction (VEC) regressions on data for Poland as it is the largest country in Central and Eastern Europe and receives the lion’s share of these two forms of capital in the region. Our investigation suggests that FDI and FPI may be regarded as substitutes. In economically stable periods FDI tends to dominate over FPI but during insecurity and economic distress FPI starts to gain importance.
This paper develops a new model of market abuse detection in real time. Market abuse is detected, as Minenna (2003) proposed, on the basis of prediction intervals. The model structure is based on the discrete-time, extended market model introduced by Monteiro, Zaman, Leitterstorf (2007) to analyze the market cleanliness. Parameters of the expected return equation are assumed, however, to be time-varying and estimated under the state-space framework using the extended Kalman filter postulated by Chou, Engle, Kane (1992) to capture the GARCH effect in returns. QML estimation is performed on intraday data; its utilization is proposed as an alternative to the continuous time modeling by Minenna (2003). This framework is generalized to the bivariate case which enables the analysis of daily open/close data. The paper also extends procedures of the statistical verification of the estimated state-space model to include the uncertainty arising from time-invariant parameters.
The sustainable development of human activities is directly related to the protection of the environment by lowering the anthropogenic stress. Pharmaceuticals – due to their growing consumption (use in medicine, veterinary, animal production, cosmetics) and their incomplete removal in wastewater treatment plants – are classified as a group of new and rapidly emerging pollutants which have been proven to have a negative impact onto water organisms. In order to ensure the proper protection of human health and the environment there is an urgent necessity of determining pharmaceuticals in clinical, cosmetic, food and environmental samples. Gas (GC) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) are valuable techniques for such determination, especially when they are coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS; LC-MS) or tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS; LC-MS/MS). The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of sustainability features of analytical techniques in the light of necessity to determine trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in the aforementioned different matrices. Using the Delphi method we performed an analysis of the key sources of the competitive advantages of the application of GC and GC-MS techniques for determining the pharmaceutical residue in clinical, cosmetic, food and environmental samples – compared to techniques based on HPLC or LC-MS. The analysis covered the following areas: (i) the features of the technique, (ii) the price, and (iii) the applicability in various sectors of economy.
The article presents a synthetic analysis of the crude oil market in Poland. As of today, this safety is provided mainly on the basis of native lignite and hard coal resources. However, the analysis of the hard coal market conducted by the authors indicates that the carried out mining restructuring (among others) led to an excessive reduction of mining volume and employment level in the hard coal mining sector. This led to a precedent situation when Poland became an importer of this energy carrier. In addition, the European Union’s requirements for greenhouse gas emissions must be taken into account. In connection with the above, it is necessary to search for new energy sources or technologies that enable hard coal to meet the requirements. It is possible to apply the so-called clean coal technologies that allow the greenhouse gas emissions generated during coal combustion to be reduced. As of today, they are not used on a mass scale, because the use of this type of technology involves additional financial expenses. However, taking into account that technologies have been growing faster and faster, are modernized in a shorter time, making a breakthrough discovery took hundreds of years, now it is often a few months, clean coal technologies can become the optimal solution in the near future. It is also necessary to diversify the sources of obtaining imported energy carriers.
The article describes coal and crude oil in terms of their mutual substitution. The article is a continuation of research conducted by the authors. Previous publications presented considerations on analogous topics related to natural gas and renewable energy sources. The crude oil market in Poland was analyzed and forecasts for oil extraction and the demand in the world and Poland by 2023 were presented. The SARIMA model was also created. The model made it possible to obtain oil an prices forecast.
About 55% of over 14 million Polish households live in multi-family buildings. Cooperative or housing association buildings have a large share in this group. The heat is supplied from the district heating network or from local sources. With respect to facilities fed from gas boiler rooms, the signing and execution of fuel supply contracts is required. From October 1, 2017, the obligation to submit tariffs for gas trading set for all final customers (except for individual gas consumers in households) for approval to the President of the Energy Regulatory Office was lifted. Decisions regarding the choice of the supplier and the content of the concluded contract are made by the authorized bodies of the cooperative or housing association. The consequences of such decisions are borne by the owners and users of residential premises. Ensuring the continuity of a contract for the supply of gaseous fuel essentially comes down to establishing prices and rates in force for a given period. The right decision on the moment of signing the contract or the amendment, termination of the existing contract and signing a new one, or negotiation efficiency will result in financial profits for all users. The costs of heating and domestic hot water preparation are a significant component of the overall cost of the maintenance of flats in Poland. Therefore, it is even more important that the prices and rates agreed upon with the gas supplier are as favorable as possible to users. The high costs of heat are not only expenses for apartment owners. The attractiveness of flat on the rental market is also decreasing. The business activity carried out in facilities located in such buildings is also less competitive.
The authors of the article analyzed gas prices on the Polish market over the last 3 years and presented the results of simulations of the effects of specific prices and rates set in the contract for the supply of fuel at the cost of heating from the point of view of a single apartment. As these are not large amounts per year, they do not motivate to optimize the terms of the gas purchase contract in this respect. The dynamics of changes in gas prices in Poland, although slightly different from world trends, is high. This makes it difficult for those responsible to make the decisions, and for residential users, it often means spending differences in subsequent years. One of the consequences of setting prices and rates significantly higher than obtainable may also be the reluctance of local communities to take measures to increase the energy efficiency of the heat supply system. From the point of view of heating costs, such decisions may distort the economic effect of thermo-modernization.
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