Cost estimates of the legal and civic informal assistance system

In: Wiadomości statystyczne / Glówny Urza̜d Statystyczny, Polskie Towarzystwo Statystyczne: czasopismo Głównego Urze̜du Statystycznego i Polskiego Towarzystwa = ˜Theœ Polish statistician, Band 61, Heft 3, S. 68-85

Abstract

The article presents estimates of the costs of the current, free legal and civil guidance system in Poland. Due to the lack of hard data the author proposes his original measurement procedure. He specifies two valuation methods: quasi-market and quasi-fiscal. According to the first of them, the public costs of the functioning of the informal legal and civil guidance system totaled 540 million PLN in 2012. This figure was obtained on the basis of information on the total number of granted advices and their distribution by difficulty or time-consuming. In the other method, depending on the availability of data and the specifics of the legal and civil donors' advices, three variants of the measurement are proposed. The total cost of the quasi-budget procedurę amounted to 514 million PLN. The obtained result is therefore close to the size of the resulting method quasi-market, which seems to strengthen the reliability of the analysis. Based on the obtained results it can be concluded that public expenditure for the functioning of non-institutionalized legal and civic assistance system is not lower than 500 million PLN per year.