Suchergebnisse

AbstractOn 1 January 1999, four major reforms took effect in Poland in the areas of health, education, pensions and local administration. After 20 years, only in the last case does the original structural design remain essentially unchanged. We examine the implications of this reform from the perspective of the distance of municipalities from their regional administrative capital. We show that despite fears of negative consequences for peripheral regions, the reform did not result in slower socio‐economic development for those municipalities that found themselves further from the new administrative centres. We argue that regional inclusiveness in the process of development is likely to be an important factor behind the stability of Poland's administrative design.

AbstractWe examine the long‐term implications of unemployment for material conditions and well‐being using the Polish sample from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Retrospective data from the SHARELIFE survey are used to reconstruct labour market experiences across the threshold of the socio‐economic transformation from a centrally planned to a free market economy in Poland. These individual experiences are matched with outcomes observed in the survey about 20 years later to examine their correlation with unemployment at the time of the transition. We find that becoming unemployed in the early 1990s correlates significantly with income, assets and a number of measures of well‐being recorded in 2007 and 2012. Using plant closures to reflect exogenous changes to labour market status at the time of the transition, we are able to confirm the causal effect of unemployment on income and house ownership 20 years later, but find no evidence for a long‐term causal relationship between unemployment and such measures of well‐being as life satisfaction, depression and subjective assessment of material conditions.

AbstractWe estimate the effect of family size on female labour supply using data from Poland and instrumenting for family size with twinning at first and second birth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to causally address this relationship in a post‐communist country. We identify the average causal effect of an additional child on mother's employment to be −7.0 pp, but we do not find significant effects of additional children on female employment among families with two or more children. Furthermore, we identify a positive bias of OLS in the estimates among highly educated mothers and those from younger cohorts.

In 2007 and 2008 Polish governments introduced a series of reforms which led to a substantial reduction in the tax wedge (in Polish: klin) on labour. We show that when considered together the package of introduced reforms brought much greater reductions in the tax burden compared to a widely discussed 15% flat tax. In the analysis we show the effects of the reforms both for the employed and for the non-employed populations. The latter analysis is done in such a way as to account for the entire (simulated) distribution of wages of the non-employed and shows interesting differences between the effects of reforms on employed and non-employed individuals. We argue that to fully appreciate the effect of reductions in labour taxation it is important to bear in mind that one of the reasons for introducing them is to make employment more likely for those who currently do not work. Given the extent of the reductions in the klin it is somewhat surprising that so far so little attention has been given to the recent Polish reforms.

In 2007 and 2008 Polish governments introduced a series of reforms which led to a substantial reduction in the tax 'wedge' (in Polish: 'klin') on labour. The mean ATR on total labour cost was reduced from 41.6% to 34.0%. We show that when considered together the package of introduced reforms brought much greater reductions in the tax burden compared to a widely discussed 15% 'flat tax'. In the analysis we show the effects of the reforms both for the employed and for the non-employed populations. The latter analysis is done in such a way as to account for the entire (simulated) distribution of wages of the non-employed and shows interesting differences between the effects of reforms on employed and non-employed individuals. We argue that to fully appreciate the effect of reductions in labour taxation it is important to bear in mind that one of the reasons for introducing them is to make employment more likely for those who currently do not work. Given the extent of the reductions in the 'klin' it is somewhat surprising that so far so little attention has been given to the recent Polish reforms.

Many aspects of the economic transition which started in 1989 in Poland are by now complete. However, the route Polish governments have so far taken concerning the system of support for low-income families still implies very different poverty alleviation schemes compared to those found in many developed countries. We examine the Polish system of social assistance in a comparative context with Germany and focus on its implications for financial incentives to work. The paper shows the effect of extending the financial support system for poorest families in Poland on labour market incentives. We demonstrate that assumptions concerning sharing of resources among families within households have significant implications on the resulting financial incentives and importantly change the implied consequences of the reforms. This is the case especially for single-adult families. 74% of single adults without children, and 53% of lone parents in Poland live in multi-family households.

We present a method for taking advantage of labour market transitions to identify effects of financial incentives on employment decisions. The framework we use is very flexible and by imposing few theoretical assumptions allows extending the modelled sample relative to structural models. We take advantage of this flexibility to include disabled people in the model and to analyse behaviour of disabled and non-disabled people jointly. A great deal of attention is paid to appropriate modelling of financial incentives on the labour market. This in the case of disabled people turns out to be an extremely complex process but one which in the end turns out well worth the effort. The model is used to compare reactions on the labour market to marginal changes in financial incentives and also to model one of the most important reforms of the UK Labour government, the introduction of the Working Families? Tax Credit. The methodology relies on matching transitions and incomes data between cross-sectional and panel surveys, and could be used in other countries where detailed reliable income data are not collected in a panel format.

AbstractParental gender preferences may affect partnership decisions and as a result lead to early life disadvantages. We study these preferences in five post‐communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, a region with strong traditional gender norms and persisting inequalities between women and men in labour market outcomes. Using subsamples of census from Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia around 2000 and 2010, we follow Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, to examine the effect of the gender of the first‐born child(ren) on fertility decisions and relationship stability of their parents. We only find strong evidence of 'boy preferences' in fertility decisions in the cases of Romania and Russia. However, unlike Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, for the US, we cannot confirm a relationship between the children's gender and parental partnership decisions. This is the case for all examined Central and Eastern European countries, as well as for a number of countries from Western Europe. The cases of Romania and Russia raise questions about other potential consequences of the documented gender preferences. We argue that our approach can be applied more broadly to identify other countries characterised by parental gender preferences, and to motivate further examination of different forms of gender driven early life disadvantages.

We use Pareto imputation, survey reweighting, and microsimulation methods applied to combined household survey and tax return data to re-evaluate trends in income inequality and redistribution in the follow up of the post-socialist transition in Poland. Our approach results in the first estimates of top-corrected inequality trends for real equivalised disposable incomes over the years 1994–2015, a period so far believed to represent a time of not only stable and but also equitable growth. The adjustments applied suggest that the Gini coefficient grew by 14–26% more compared to the uncorrected survey-based estimates. This indicates that over the last three decades Poland has become one of the most unequal European countries among those for which top-corrected inequality estimates exist. Looking at different centiles of the distribution shows that incomes at the top grew fastest during the post-transition years: the annual rate of growth of the 95-99th percentiles of income distribution exceeded 3.5%, while the median income grew by about 2.6%.The findings shed a new light on recent political developments in Poland.

À partir des données de l'enquête sur la santé, le vieillissement et la retraite en Europe (Share), nous pouvons analyser la relation qui existe entre la santé et les conditions socioéconomiques : c'est ce que nous appelons « gradient socio-économique de la santé ». Nous nous intéressons aux individus âgés de 50 à 56 ans de 10 pays européens à deux périodes distinctes (2004-2006 et 2013-2015), en comparant le gradient entre deux groupes de génération. Nous examinons cette relation en fonction de quatre mesures de la santé et de quatre indicateurs du statut socio-économique : l'éducation, le revenu, la richesse financière et la richesse réelle. Il existe bel et bien une relation forte et statistiquement significative entre la santé, qu'elle soit physique ou mentale, et les variables socioéconomiques, mais nous avons trouvé peu d'éléments prouvant le nivellement du gradient entre les groupes en Europe. Pour ce qui concerne la santé mentale, nous montrons que le gradient s'est accentué chez les cohortes les plus jeunes en matière d'actifs financiers. codes JEL : I14 Santé et inégalité ; I15 Développement sanitaire et économique

There is by now a vast number of studies which document a sharp increase in cross-sectional wage inequality during the 2000s. It is often assumed that this inequality is of a permanent nature which in turn is used as an argument calling for government intervention. We examine these claims using a fully balanced panel of full-time employed individuals in Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 19942006. In line with previous studies, our sample shows sharply rising inequality during the 2000s. Applying covariance structure models, we calculate the fraction of permanent and transitory wage and earnings inequality. From 1994 on, permanent inequality increases continuously, peaks in 2001 and then declines in subsequent years. Interestingly the decline in the permanent fraction of inequality occurs at the time of most rapid increases in cross-sectional inequality. It seems therefore that it is primarily the temporary and not the permanent component which has driven the strong expansion of cross-sectional inequality during the 2000s in Germany.