Regional Economics

The doctoral programme Regional Economics complements and extends the offer of degree programmes at the faculty. Its aim is to prepare highly qualified experts for analytical, research and management work. The way to achieve the aim is to teach students to use a systems approach as an effective tool for complex solutions of scientific and research issues related to regional and local development and its broader ties.

The graduates will acquire knowledge and skills enhancing their possible prospective career, particularly in the area of research and development. The competitive advantage will be the acquisition of the basic idea contained in the motto "think globally, act locally". In accordance with this, they will also have very good prerequisites for careers in creative areas of economics with the growing demand for this type of experts.

The main research topics, which are in the programme focus, are the regional assessment of investment and residential attractiveness in the innovative context of territorial competitiveness, analyses of the innovation potential of regions, the theoretical and methodological models of assessment of long-term ties between the territorial competitiveness, development sustainability, and quality of life, modelling of integration processes with an emphasis on the creation of development axes at the regional, national and supranational levels or conceptualizing new concepts related to the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

The programme will be taught both by the internal staff of the faculty, who have considerable experience with region-oriented research as well as related or marginal economic fields, and external experts who work at foreign universities and enjoy considerable respect in the field.

The material and technical provisions for the study will be quite extraordinary. Specifically for the students of the doctoral degree programme Regional Economics, infrastructure in the form of Regional Economics Laboratory is being built. This will provide a wide range of options for individual as well as group work. The study will be also supported by the current top literature and a wide range of electronic sources and databases.

After successfully completing his/her studies the graduate is able to:

• independently conduct scientific and research activities, investigate or participate in projects of basic research
• acquire and organize partial research results, interpret the findings, present the conclusions of their work, and defend them against the scientific community, reflect on critical comments of their outputs and results
• cooperate with domestic and foreign experts operating in marginal scientific fields
• use the knowledge learned from the field of regional theory application for their expert lectures and in the course of their teaching activities
• interpret diverse effects of spatial principles and analyse and verify their specific impacts on the development of social systems
• prepare proposals of project applications for various grant schemes
• use theoretical approaches and methods used in marginal scientific fields, in particular when creating innovative comprehensive regional development models
• participate in the formation of concepts, strategies and development plans at the local and regional or national and supranational levels, with a specific emphasis on the use of the so-called place-based approaches
• apply the method of multicriteria assessment of large investment projects financed from public sources as a comprehensively oriented method extending the information capacity of the cost-benefit analysis
• participate in the creation of feasibility studies of investment projects in the private and public sectors, strategic development projects of companies or specific studies of investment opportunities

Graduates of the doctoral degree programme Regional Economics will find possible occupation in both private and public institutions, at the local, national or supranational levels. Out of the potential occupations, these will be in particular:

- research positions in the academic field, institutions of basic and applied research in the Czech Republic and abroad, including positions of investigators of projects financed by international grant schemes,

- academic positions of university type (education of students, research into regional economics, development of the field),

- expert and project leaders in consultation agencies and advisory centres,

- managerial positions within regional and national (central) institutions of the public sector,

- managerial positions in international institutions, including the European Union institutions,

- managers and executives within private companies using their analytical skills and a wide regional economic perspective,

- conceptual and analytical positions in all types of public institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as companies in the private sector,

- founding positions and positions of significant personalities of field-oriented think-tanks.

Part of the degree programme Regional Economics is a mandatory internship at a foreign institution, at least one month long. The Slovak Republic is not considered abroad for this context. The internship can be done within available external grant schemes, but also without their support. The obligation for the internship can be replaced, with the consent of the subject-area board, with a participation in an international creative project with results published or presented abroad.

The student may participate in another non-obligatory internship during the study at a domestic or foreign institution, at least one month long. Credits for optional courses are granted for this optional internship.

Formal and content requirements for dissertation theses are described in the directive of ESF MU:

https://is.muni.cz/auth/do/econ/ds/9295433/Directive_12_2018.pdf