Economic performance of the NUTS III Regions in the Czech Republic in the context of entrepreneurship subsidies from the EU Structural Funds

Entrepreneurship is considered to be one of the essential factors of economic growth and entrepreneurship policy is considered to be a significant contributor to the regional economic development. The aim of the present paper is to determine whether the unemployment rate and the GDP per capita of the NUTS III regions in the Czech Republic are influenced by the amount of financial subsidies paid to businesses from the Operational Programme Enterprise and Innovation (OPEI). We employed regression analysis and Granger Causality testing in order to evaluate our Hypotheses. Results from the use of econometric models confirmed statistically significant positive impact of OPEI subsidies lagged by one year on the growth of NUTS III GDP per capita. However, we were unable to confirm statistically significant initial impact of OPEI subsidies on the growth of GDP per capita. The hypothesis assuming negative impact of OPEI subsidies on changes of regional unemployment rate was statistically confirmed both initially and with a lag of one year.