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  FACULTY OF ECONOMICS AND ADMINISTRATION 

   Dean’s Office, Lipová 41a, 659 79 Brno

   tel.: ++420–5–43 523 111
   fax: ++420–5–43 523 222
   http://www.econ.muni.cz/


   Dean:    Assoc. Prof. Ing. Antonín Slaný
     

   Vice-dean:

   Ing. Jaroslav Rektořík.
     Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kamil Fuchs
     Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ivan Malý
     Dr. Luboš Bauer
   
   President of the Academic Senate:    Prof. Ing. Jiří Lanča
     
   Secretary:       Ing. František Křivánek

The year 2000, in which the Masaryk University Faculty of Economics and Administration (MU FEA) entered its 10th year of its existence, was marked by a number of significant changes at the faculty.   

All departments of the Faculty concentrated on the active introduction of the Higher Education Act into practice and its application under faculty conditions. A new faculty charter was prepared, including appendices, and the MU Information System was put to good use for the purposes of faculty management and the organisation of study programmes.

The Faculty experienced very positive development in international relations, especially in terms of student mobility and in establishing new contacts with institutes abroad.

Teaching activities: the Faculty of Economics and Administration was busy working on the innovation of study programmes, the preparation of the fourth study discipline, i.e. Economics and Management in the Ph.D. programme and commencing the life-long education programme. The innovation is mainly connected with the systematic introduction of courses on individual branches of law, the introduction of the Bachelor’s programme and the follow-up Master’s programme in the full-time study form, and with the preparation of the Public Law programme in French for accreditation, and its follow-up Master’s programme starting in the 2001/2002 academic year in co-operation with the University of Rennes I and the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University.

Courses in Management as part of a six-semester programme of life-long education (accredited for combined Bachelor’s studies) and on Finance (with a specialisation in Building Savings) were launched (the latter in co-operation with the Bohemian-Moravian Building Savings Bank).

In 2000, the interest in studying at the Faculty continued to be high. In the 2000/2001 academic year, 2433 people applied for the full-time five-year Master’s study programme, and 314 students were registered. For the combined-study three-year Bachelor’s programme, 1952 applied and 406 were registered. The total number of people interested in studying at the Faculty in 2000 was 4385, i.e. 180 more than the year before. Provisions were also made for the acceptance of disabled students into the programme.

Faculty research activities were organised in accordance with its own priorities and Higher Education Act no. 111/1998.

The main objective was to make a systematic effort to obtain grant projects from grant agencies (GA CR, Higher Education Development Fund), grants from other ministries and international grants.

In 2000, the Faculty obtained 11 grants. One was a research grant, and 1 was a project financed by the Kontakt programme of the Ministry of Education. Five projects were obtained from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (in three of which the Faculty only assisted). The Faculty obtained one project from the Higher Education Development Fund. Two other grants were awarded by the Austrian Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and one international project by the Open Society Fund Praha, Bratislava. Two projects were researched within bilateral Czech and Slovak cooperation in science and technology. In the Internal Grant System, six critical assessments were made at the faculty. In 2000, one Ph.D. student completed her studies. Currently there are 86 post-graduate students, of which 37 attend full-time type of courses and 49 are registered in combined study programmes.

Publication activity: the Faculty succeeded in meeting its editorial plan for 2000: it published 17 books on pedagogical issues, 15 works of scholarly research character (monographs, book publications and almanacs) and 5 publications of Faculty importance. Other works are ready to be published next year. All of the published works can be obtained in the Faculty bookshop (also selling other textbooks and things for students) and in the Ekopress chain of shops. A catalogue of publications that can be ordered is also available on the Faculty web site.

As every year, the Faculty ran its competition for the FEA Dean’s Prize. A total of 31 students entered in 2000 at MU FEA, a number of important events took place that were either co-organized by the faculty, or held under its auspices.

In January, the traditional international seminar "Issues of NGOs and Regional Administrations in the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Austria" organised as one of the main outputs of the PHARE CBC FMTP research project took place at the Faculty.

Held in April of 2000, the conference with international participation on "Success Factors in Business" was the presentation of results of research analyses into success factors in the corporate environment.

At the end of the 1999/2000 academic year, the international seminar "Institutional Support of Business in the Regions" took place at MU FEA.

For the fourth time, the Faculty of Economics and Administration organised the international conference "European Integration and Education". The conference was held under the auspices of the Ambassador of the EU the head of the Delegation of the European Commission in the Czech Republic Ramiro Cibrian, the Ambassador of the Austrian Republic in the Czech Republic Klaus Daublebsky, the Ambassador of the Slovak Republic in the Czech Republic Jozef Stank, and the Rector of Masaryk University Brno Prof. Dr. Jiří Zlatuška. The objective of the conference was muster support for European integration processes in education, to help improve the quality of teaching in this area, to provide information about the possibilities of international co-operation and to facilitate the meeting of interested conference participants with important personalities. Particular attention was paid to opinions about the National Education Programme, and to the changes connected to the reform of public administration.

In 2000, international relations were further developed, mainly on the basis of bilateral agreements and contracts within the SocrateS programme. Through this programme, over 30 Faculty students had the opportunity to participate in study stays at 16 foreign institutes.

Thanks to the active involvement of the Faculty in the MIBP PECO programme organised under the auspices of École Superieure de Commerce Chambery in France, the Faculty signed exchange agreements with another four European universities, in Italy (Milan), Giron (Spain), and Jönköping (Sweden).  

Student exchanges with FHS Eisenstadt in Austria through the CEEPUS programme continued. A new project of co-operation through the programme was launched with the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

One of the Faculty's priorities in the field of international relations for the year 2000 was the intensification of contacts with schools in countries that are closest to us from the geographical point of view. On 28 February 2000, a preliminary Memorandum of Co-operation was signed by FEA with the Academy of Economics in Katowice (Poland), and on the basis of that agreement, the Agreement of Co-operation was signed by Rectors of both universities on 29 September 2000. The co-operation will involve the exchange of students in Master’s and post-graduate programmes for one semester. Another area of co-operation will be in research activities.

Another Polish institution with which co-operation negotiations are underway is the Akademia Ekonomiczna in Krakow. The Faculty already took the first step towards establishing co-operation when it visited the Akademia in October 2000 to negotiate a preliminary agreement on the signing of the contract.

Co-operation was successfully developed with Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, whose teachers repeatedly came as guest speakers to the Faculty of Economics and Administration. Because of overwhelming student interest, the 2000 summer semester course of Dr. P. Trcky Einflüsse der EU auf Managemententscheidungen was repeated, and in the 2000/2001 winter semester, Dr. Christiane Erten-Buch returned to MU FEA to teach the course "Human Resource Management".

Another important foreign guest of the Faculty in 2000 was the American lecturer Brooke Wilson from McLennan Community College (MCC) in Waco, Texas (USA), who presented a lecture course on Environmental Economics. 

In August 2000, Professor Paul Concilio, also a lecturer at MCC in Waco, visited the Faculty. He showed interest in the possibilities of co-operation, the study programme and a possible exchange lecture visits of teachers of the two schools.

In September 2000, Prof. Dr. Anatoli Berditchevsky of FHS Eisenstadt (Austria) delivered a lecture at the Faculty on The Current Economic Situation in Russia.

A number of lectures at the Faculty of Economics and Administration were also delivered by leading Czech economics experts, and lectures by Dr. L. Niedermayer of the Czech National Bank in Prague and by Miroslav Ševčík of the Liberal Institute in Prague met with great interest.