Dubravko Mihaljek, Head of Macroeconomic Analysis at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, held lecture Global economy and low inflation at the Institute of Public Finance on 20 September 2016.

The lecturer emphasized the fact that the global economy has shown unexpected resilience to the many disruptions during the past year, but despite moderate strengthening of economic activity and still very expansive monetary policy, the inflation remains very low. He explained the main causes of low inflation, its consequences on economic and monetary policy, possibility to question numerical inflation targets as well as theoretical and empirical grounds on which the concept of targeted inflation is based.

In the new issue of Financial Theory and Practice you can read the article The evolution of law under communism and post-communism: a system-theory analysis in the spirit of Luhmann written by Bruno Schönfelder who suggests that Luhmann’s theory of social systems and evolution offers a powerful approach for analyzing law and the economy. It considers the sample of Central European countries before and after 1990. Massimo Milevoj in the article Financial transactions taxation in the European Union and Croatia provides a systematic review of what is known about the financial transactions tax, its practical application in EU countries and elsewhere in the world and its impacts on financial markets. A special emphasis is placed on the outlook for the taxation of financial transactions in the EU and the possibilities and constraints in the Republic of Croatia. Yan Zheng and Tomislav Vukina in the article Using the age-based insurance eligibility criterion to estimate moral hazard in medical care consumption use fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the moral hazard effect in health care consumption in the population of young adults. The analysis finds a 92% reduction in the number of hospital visits for individuals who lost insurance coverage when crossing the 18th birthday threshold. Ana Grdović Gnip reviews the book Financial institutions and markets in the European Union – regulation and supervision (Marta Božina Beroš).

In Newsletter entitled The contribution for occupational health protection Marijana Bađun analyses how the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (CHIF) spends the funds collected from the contribution for occupational health protection.