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The Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance member, Central European countries found themselves in a difficult political and economic situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Three post-Eastern Bloc countries formed the Visegrad Group to strengthen their ties to the West, but the need for foreign investment, job creation and technology transfer was urgent. This is when military modernisation also came into the picture and the counter-trade—as known as offset—as a tool to help these economies. A trade practice which was meant to energise these economies via defence acquisitions linked economic programmes. Two Visegrad Group member countries, Hungary and the Czech Republic decided to sign offset agreement with the defence firm SAAB to license Gripen fighter aircrafts. This study intends to analyse if these deals were able to help governments to reach their objectives or the two countries were unable to take advantage of the offset programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since August 2001, the absolute gravimeter FG5#215 has been used for the modernization of the national gravity networks of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Altogether 43 absolute stations were measured, some of them repeatedly. Absolute gravity at 29 stations had already been determined in 1990s by other absolute gravimeters (FG5 or JILAg). Differences of repeated measurements at most of the stations show an unexpected decrease of gravity (up to 22 μGal) over the whole region. An uncertainty assessment of absolute measurements with a special emphasis put on hydrological effects shows a statistical significance of the detected gravity variations at many stations. In this manuscript, three possible reasons of such findings are discussed: (1) a regional geodynamic activity, (2) systematic instrumental errors (offsets), (3) hydrological effects. The analysis and statistics of the gravity differences in context of international comparisons of absolute gravimeters show offsets up to 9μGal related to data of the JILAg-6 and FG5#107 gravimeters. Data collected in this study demonstrate that considering instrumental and hydrological effects on gravity are crucial for a correct interpretation of repeated absolute gravity measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]