Services in the context of entrepreneurial environment of the Czech Republic [Služby v kontextu podnikatelského prostředí České Republiky]

The article deals with the current situation of entrepreneurial environment in the service sector in the Czech Republic. In the introduction the development of the service sector is characterized in the context of the transformation process of the Czech national economy. The further part of the article is focused on various concepts of the service industry classification, namely from the viewpoint of purpose, branch specification, impact on a customer, and the process approach. The significance of the position of individual service branches within the Czech regions was analyzed with the assistance of location quotients in two variants. Initially location quotients were determined on the basis of the number of employees in particular service branches according to the CZ-NACE classification. A similar analysis was performed in the second research phase, but it was based on the number of economic entities registered in these branches. An advantage of the second analysis is data availability on the level of two-digit CZ-NACE classification codes. Subsequently, the service branches were clustered into four basic categories: professional services, service shop, and mass services of hedonic or utilitarian characters. The executed analyses show a dominant position of the capital Prague in the service sector. Simultaneously, Prague evinces the strongest position in the category of professional services. A similar character was also found in the case of the Southmoravian region. The position of services in other regions is less important. The service sector in these regions employs in average only about 50 per cent of labour force; and it consists mainly of standardized services provided through service shops. The final part of the article presents an analysis of the effect of the servicesstructure on the regional economic level (measured through the gross domestic product per capita). The results do not show a significant correlation between the share of economic entities in the services and the regional economic level