Lubos Smutka

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague | CULS · Faculty of Economics and Management

Pro-environmental intentions encourage individuals to make conscious decisions that help protect the environment, reduce waste, conserve resources, and preserve natural habitats. This study aims to assess the predictive power of environmental concern, perceived behavioral control and social norms in determining the pro-environmental intentions in t...

In recent years, research on trade rebalancing in agri-food supply chains has gained prominence due to trade sanctions, supply chain disruptions, and vulnerabilities exposed by pandemics and conflicts. This study focuses on the recalibration of agri-food trade dynamics, using the 2014 Russian import ban as a case study. The ban significantly altere...

Previous research on the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability remains ambiguous, with limited exploration of stakeholder influence. This study addresses this gap by analyzing data from 14,206 firm-year observations of Chinese manufacturing companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges (20...

Purpose Increasing the need for education for sustainable development in universities requires an understanding of the predictors of students’ environmental concern (EC). In this paper, the authors focus on the EC of business students because of their future responsibility for business operations regarding the exploitation of natural resources. The...

In order to determine the level of contamination of the area, the formulas of Muller, Hokonson and Nemerow were used. Using the information of 2009 on this area, the changes by years were analyzed with the results obtained during the scientific research. The advantage of using pollution indicators is the possibility of direct comparison of differen...

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), cloud technologies, and Big Data computing power have paved the way for the rapid evolution of predictive analytics in the power and energy sector. Thence, the integration of predictive analytics to assess the state of power systems during design or during operation can...

Sustainable food security is a pressing global challenge, requiring research and advocacy for both production and consumption practices. On one hand, the focus of research lies in the development of technologies and processes that enable the production of food with minimal losses and a reduced negative environmental impact. On the other hand, effor...

Green bonds are useful monetary tools that can finance sustainable endeavors to bolster an eco-friendly economy. This research inspects the frequency-domain causal relationship between diverse green bond types and the green economy from June 30, 2014 to August 3, 2023. The goal is to understand both permanent and temporary causal phenomena between...

The public perspective on genetically modified foods (GMFs) has been intensely debated and scrutinized. Often, discussions surrounding GMF tend to revolve solely around the potential health risks associated with their consumption. However, it is essential to acknowledge that public perceptions of genetically modified foods are multifaceted, encompa...

Recent dynamics in the sugar industry, including price fluctuations in the global market, reforms in the European sugar sector, and changes in intra-regional trade patterns, underscore the need to understand changes in the competitiveness of African sugar exports. This paper, therefore, uses the Normalized Revealed Comparative Advantage (NRCA) inde...

The European Union is the world’s largest producer of sugar beet and one of the main consumer markets in the world. The EU market is very specific as for 50 years, it was one of the most regulated markets in the agri-food sector. For more than three decades, the Union maintained an extremely costly supply management regime in its domestic sugar mar...

Introduction This study deals with agricultural practices and their implications on soil health and crop yield using economic optimization. Specifically, the research focuses on the impact of different crops, such as canola, wheat, and meadow clover, on soil nitrogen levels and the subsequent effects on crop health. Methods A model of nitrogen flo...

Introduction Sugar ranks among the most widely consumed, traded, sensitive, and protected commodities on the global and intra-regional stages. Recent developments in the sugar industry, inclusive of price distortions in the global sugar market, the liberalization of the European sugar sector, and the globalization of international agricultural trad...

This paper explores the critical question of the sustainability of Russian solar energy initiatives in the absence of governmental financial support. The study aims to determine if Russian energy companies can maintain operations in the solar energy sector without relying on direct state subsidies. Methodologically, the analysis utilizes establishe...

The subchapter deals with the theoretical and political roots of the sustainability concept and its changes over time. It identifies four main directions of theoretical, political, and business practice, whereby the relationship between economic growth and its environmental and socio-economic consequences were first identified, then gradually trans...

Today, almost all large cities have a landfill for municipal solid waste, where solid waste is dumped, stored and partially disposed. Storage and disposal of household waste (mainly by burning) can negatively impact the structure, productivity indicators, and the agroecological state of the soil cover common around the landfill. Such high levels of...

Introduction This paper investigates the links between deforestation and key economic, social, environmental, and geographical variables. We focus on per capita GDP, total forest cover, and the population across a diverse sample of countries from five continents for the last three decades. Methods This study utilizes a regression model using panel...

In 2015, three Prague universities together with Škoda Auto started a student project on finding a sustainable concept of a car-sharing service. In 2018 the service entirely designed, developed and operated by students went into life under its own brand name - Uniqway. It overcame harsh covid seasons and proved capability of return to precovid numb...

The cost of generating electricity in developing countries surpasses the government's ability to sustain it, necessitating the involvement of the private sector in this service provision through public-private partnerships (PPPs) contracts. In Syria, the electricity system has been highly susceptible to damage as a result of the ongoing crisis, lea...

Addressing risks and pandemics at a country level is a complex task that requires transdisciplinary approaches. The paper aims to identify groups of the European Union countries characterized by a similar COVID-19 Resilience Index (CRI). Developed in the paper CRI index reflects the countries’ COVID-19 risk and their readiness for a crisis situatio...

The paper aims at the question of using Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities as a marketing tool from the customers’ perspective in the Slovak food market. Five research questions and hypotheses were set to reach the given aim. The research was based on a questionnaire survey with 1254 respondents. The frequency and contingency tables w...

Small Nuclear Reactors (SNR) can provide climate-neutral, stable electricity and heating if located in people’s neighborhoods close to people’s dwellings. The extensive use of SNR would reduce capacity requirements for energy transmission systems and increase the overall stability of energy grids. However, the public fear location of SNR close to t...

Resource and waste management are indispensable to environmentally conscious action and a large part of EU Green politics. Little is known about factors affecting individual propensity for resource and waste management. The article examines the effects of environmental concerns, perceptions of climate change, preferences for EU integration, and med...

Our paper focuses on assessing the role of state funding in supporting wind energy projects with a focus on economic efficiency and risk assessment. In particular, we analyze the new program aimed at supporting Russian renewable energy (RE) projects envisaged for the period from 2024-2035 that involves a reduction in investments in such projects an...

Impact of coronavirus disease on sustainable growth and food security is dramatically negative. Despite significant number of publications focused on food security and coronavirus disease issues, a deeper analysis of food security damages activated by COVID-19 is necessary. This determines the main task of this research. Theoretical block of the st...

Factors impacting green consumption studied in the literature include 1) economic incentives and possibilities, 2) socio-dem1ographic segmentation, 3) values, emotions and personal responsibilities, 4) information including education and mass media, 5) factors related to the locality of the respondents and the lifestyles. While the effects of envir...

Since 2021, Russia has maintained a list of unfriendly countries. This list and the import ban list introduced in 2014 are some of the main economic sanctions Russia uses to influence trading partners. This paper attempts to quantify the effect of putting a trading partner on the list of unfriendly countries compared to the Russian import ban. The...

Environmental protection is often seen in conflict with individual freedom and economic growth. The proponents of environmental protection suggest that the environment is a global resource that must be protected for future generations, even at the expense of economic growth and individual freedoms. The opponents claim that environmental protection...

Czech farm-land had enjoyed considerable growth in value from 2008 to 2019. This paper identifies the main determinants of agricultural land prices variations and how these variations are influenced by urbanization, lease payments, and subsidies. These three factors were thoroughly examined for the existence of a unit root using the Augmented Dicke...

The importance of environmental sustainability is becoming more and more obvious, so the rationale behind long-term usage of solely non-renewable energy sources appeared questionable. This study aims to identify, using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and logistic regressions, the main determinants that affect the duration of Russian non-renewable en...

Although economic growth is always one of the priorities for a country, an ever-growing economy is unsustainable in the long run. Environment protection, public participation in decision-making, and, nowadays, even strong defense forces gain increasing importance for country sustainability. The paper studies trade-offs between national goals as imp...

This paper discusses the dynamics of foreign trade in the post-Soviet space within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) during the period from 2015 to 2021. Additionally, the paper analyzes export indicators in foreign and mutual trade of the EAEU member countries and diversification of the commodity structure as well as its dynamics based on the com...

Emotional creativity (EC) refers to cognitive abilities and personality traits related to the originality of emotional experience and expression. Previous studies have found that the COVID-19 epidemic and the restrictions imposed increased the levels of negative emotions, which obstructed adaptation. This research suggests that EC predicts the moti...

Accession of Poland to the European Single Market generated trade creation and diversion effects, which in turn resulted in a high degree of concentration of the Polish foreign trade in agri-food products with other EU countries. On the one hand, a high share of export to the markets of countries with a stable market economy is a confirmation of th...

The sustainability of international trade is subject to immense pressure. Apart from obstructed logistics, disruption of production chains and changes in demand, the sustainability of international trade is heavily affected by the sanctions caused by the Russia–Ukraine conflict. This paper studies the factors predicting sustainable international tr...

With the EU Green Deal initiatives, European members seek to launch the first climate neutral continent by 2050. This paper assesses the stochastic convergence of per capita energy consumption series for an illustrative sample of 15 EU countries with memberships prior to the 2004 enlargement, using data spanning the 1970–2018 period. Results from t...

Regional cooperation represents a viable alternative to the ongoing process of globalization, in which countries can optimally respond to the changes in the external environment through regional integration, while a larger market size tends to provide better sales opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to identify common determinants of the im...

The increasing volume and value of food waste is a huge threat to achieving sustainable development, food market stability, human population growth, and people’s well-being. Considering that consumers are responsible for a large degree of food waste, the current study looks at the problem of household food waste from the perspective of both food pr...

The purpose of this article is to present the tourist attractiveness of rural areas as a factor of social tourism in Poland and the Czech Republic. The systematic literature review (SLR) research method was used to verify the aim. An extensive review of the literature has been made which has made it possible to present the importance of tourist att...

Import and export have been acknowledged for their beneficial effects on sustainable economic development. In the context of economic globalization, the dynamics of exchange rates are more critical and necessary to export success and sustainable development. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of exchange rates contributes to the achievement of e...

The meat consumption at the current level is highly unsustainable. Because of the problems that meat production causes to the environment, it is considered as one of the main problems. Vegetarian and vegan private label products represent a new challenging trend in addressing the customers within sustainable food consumption at affordable prices. T...

Currently, there is a growing number of studies related to assessing the cost-effectiveness of renewable energy projects around the world. This topic is also very relevant for the Russian energy market that is otherwise dominated by oil and gas. The Russian Ministry of Energy forecasts that local power plants running on the renewable energy sources...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of monetization as a priority of the new monetary growth of the economies using the example of the Russian economy, identifying new trends in global practices of monetary factor management, as well as the search for ways to stimulate economic growth using the best international experien...

The paper evaluates Czech sugar companies in the process of transformation and abolition of quotas on the European sugar market. The assessment focuses on payment behaviour, financial health and condition. Sugar companies in the Czech Republic had a low probability of bankruptcy before the beginning of 2019 and subsequently in 2020, and good paymen...

The main goal of the paper is to evaluate the impact of the Russian import ban on the development of agricultural exports from EU member states. The study is based on a time-series analysis of empirical statistical indicators. The analysed period is between 2009 and 2019. The source of data for individual analyses is UN Comtrade (2021). The evaluat...

The paper, based on RCA, LFI and GL indices, and logistic regression analysis, allowed us to track the dynamics of the comparative advantage/disadvantage of the Czech Republic in individual commodity aggregates in relation to individual EU partners, and to comprehend the role of the main production factors. The only production factor with a statist...

Today, only around 20% of the water resources available in Georgia are used for fish farming. This means that the freshwater aquaculture VC has the potential to increase production, ensure incomes for the VC actors and contribute to the country food security and protein intake. Effective decentralised water management is needed to preserve the qual...

The rising public debt level in Africa and the sustainability of that debt remains an important research agenda. As such, understanding the factors that impact the rising public debt level in Africa remains an important research agenda. Our paper investigates the key determining drivers that have a direct and indirect impact on the rising level of...

The question of the sources of agricultural competitiveness is widely discussed on the farm and sectoral levels in the European Union. This paper assesses the competitiveness of the plant production using the combination of trade measures and strategic management measures in the selected European countries related to the Czech Republic. Thus, the p...

This study aims to evaluate the water balance of the crop mix of the Czech Republic and the tendencies of its development during the period 1961–2019. For calculating water deficits, methodology from ČSN 750434 (Czech technical standards) was used and on its basis, the deficits of the ten most frequently represented crops of the Czech Republic were...

Innovation and sustainable development have become buzzwords in the 21st century with the idea of creative destruction launched by Joseph Alois Schumpeter being the base for evolutionary economics. However, new institutional economics helps to understand the necessity of support provided to entrepreneurs and innovators by science and administration...

The paper assesses Slovak sugar factories in the process of transformation of the European sugar market from the point of view of financial health and financial condition. Before the start of the 2020/2021 campaign, sugar factories in Slovakia had a low probability of bankruptcy and excellent payment morale towards their customers, which they maint...

The distribution of the impact of the Russian import ban on the EU28 countries is not uniform. The market shares and clustering of the EU28 countries changed before and after the introduction of the ban. Although the Russian import ban was introduced as a countermeasure to Western sectoral and individual sanctions, the ban’s impact on EU28 economie...

The study examines frequent price discounts in retail chains in the Czech Republic for a selected range of products (milk, eggs and poultry). Combined with sub-purchase or sub-cost prices, such frequent promotional activities might lead to a decrease in the tax base for VAT payments to the state budget and to a potential loss of VAT. The study intr...

Machine learning algorithms have been applied in the agriculture field to forecast crop productivity. Previous studies mainly focused on the whole crop growth period while different time windows on yield prediction were still unknown. The entire growth period was separated into each month to assess their corresponding predictive ability by taking m...

The objective of the article is to identify the groups of regions characterised by a similar level of human capital determinants and investigate the relationship between cluster-based human capital determinants and economic development. We analyse key demographic, health, educational, labour, technological, and cultural determinants of human capita...

COVID-19 is likely to be the 2020s’ deadliest pandemic according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There have been more than 3.7 million confirmed deaths after 15 months spread. Besides the loss of human lives, COVID-19 has other unfavorable impacts on society, education, and the economy. Due to successive lockdowns and the continuous quarant...

The countryside aging is widely considered European problem. The same could be observed at the level of farms, where in several European countries farming population is getting statistically older. Thus, this paper aims to define the main aspects of the young farmer support policies and programmes applied in the Czech Republic. Also, in addition, w...

The current increase in government spending, caused by COVID epidemics and the increasing visibility of leftist political groups in public media, emphasizes the short-term need for sustainable income taxation. In the long run, rising inequality worldwide makes taxation of high-incomes indispensable for sustainable economic development. This paper e...

While the scientific community presents a relatively uniform conclusion on the ongoing global warming and the policies that are essential for sustainable development and the mitigation of the negative effects of climate change, the public opinion on the topic is far from uniform. This article studies the factors related to public awareness of clima...