Publishing Performance of Czech Academic Economists: (Just) a Matter of Time?

In 1995, the Czech Republic joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and in 2004 it became a member of the European Union. While the country´s transition process has apparently been completed and the Czech Republic became a standard market economy with developed democratic institutions, its higher education sector has not passed fundamental reforms yet. In this, both empirical and policy paper, we first briefly summarize past developments in national policies related to academic research and then argue that despite the reform efforts a low degree of international research competitiveness remains a major problem in the Czech academia, as clearly proved by rather poor publishing performance of senior academic staff in economic disciplines. To indirectly test the community impact of a series of research measures recently introduced by the Czech government, we employ regression models to assess the publishing performance of 322 associate professors and 121 full professors of economics appointed between January 1999 and January 2015, focusing on the number of their contributions to journals and conference proceedings listed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Our empirical findings show that, although there is a recent positive trend of the increasing number of scholar publications in the Czech Republic, a large portion of the publications appears in lower-ranked domestic journals and conference proceedings rather than high-quality international periodicals. Thus, many senior academic economists still lack a solid proof of meeting international publishing standards.