I38 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare ProgramsNávrat zpět

The social policy of the European Union is focused mainly on the most vulnerable group of citizens. The social instruments that countries use to increase the living conditions and to decrease social exclusion and vulnerability can differ between countries. The submitted paper uses cluster analysis to compare 27 member states of the European Union based on their social policy instruments in 2019. The study analyses the dependence of social policy instruments and household financial vulnerability using correlation and regression analysis. It examines whether higher levels of social benefits and government expenditure result in lower financial vulnerability. However, the results suggest that the financial vulnerability of households is not associated with low benefits. Clusters reporting a low level of benefits recorded a low financial vulnerability of households and vice versa. Results of the correlation and cluster analysis prove that the increase of the first factor (benefits in material need, expenditure on active labour market policy, family benefits, disability benefits) and the third factor (unemployment benefits) are associated with a decrease in financial vulnerability of households.

Ambiguous terminology as well as causality and a too wide spectrum of determinants on the demand side of the welfare state are the main drawbacks in the literature on the topic. The aim of this paper is to systematise the literature on individual support for the welfare state. Besides clarification of the terminology and argumentation of prevailing causality (informal institutions → individual support for the welfare state), the paper underlines the importance of individualist values and beliefs; in particular, individual control over one's own life, which can be based on the psychological concepts of locus of control and self-efficacy and can be empirically tested thanks to the WVS/EVS databases.

Unconditional basic income should guarantee that all residents have sufficient material conditions for their existence. Compared to other existing social security programs, basic income is unique in its simplicity. It also supports the individuals' freedom of use of their disposible time. The article analyzes the expected impact of the introduction of an unconditional basic income on the labor market. It also compares basic income to other social security programs (wage subsidies, targeted social programs, a negative income tax and tax credits) on a theoretical level from the perspective of a recipient. Unconditional basic income's effects on labor supply would be rather negative. However, relative to other social security programs, unconditional basic income can guarantee a higher or the same utility level, but it may not motivate to participate in the labor market. Additional positives are transparency and lack of incentives to cheat. The prospect of lower administrative costs depends on the specific basic income scheme in question.

The article deals with life and job satisfaction of the Czech working-age population. First it highlights concepts of happiness and satisfaction within the emerging multidimensional approaches to individual and societal well-being. Then, it resumes the data sources of those measures, with specific attention to the Module on Subjective Well-being of the survey EU-SILC. Using this data, basic characteristics and determinants of life satisfaction are shown first and basic characteristics and determinants of job satisfaction after that. Finally the relationship between these two dimensions of satisfaction is analysed. It appears that determination of life satisfaction by socio-demographic and economic characteristics of individuals and households is much higher than the determination of job satisfaction. The identity of "contradictory" categories where life satisfaction significantly outweighs job satisfaction and vice versa is weak.

The article documents the development of life satisfaction in four transitional Central European countries since 1991, in comparison with Germany and Austria. After presentation of data sources and the overview of the literature regarding the effect of transition on life satisfaction, surveys of European Values Study 1991, 1999 and 2008 are analysed together with macroeconomic data. First, satisfaction levels are correlated with GDP and then, individual characteristics of income, gender, education and family status are regressed to as explanatory variables of life satisfaction. While the explanatory power of GDP is found as very weak for the entire period, the effect of objective characteristics has peaked in 1999 and the effect of subjective perceptions in 2008. The survey information on trends after 2008 differs but no dramatic change of the life satisfaction due to the economic recession has so far appeared.

The goal of this paper is to develop the theoretical framework of the public goods provision. This theoretic contribution is based on the critical analysis of mainstream economics theories dealing with public goods as market failure (neoclassical economics and neoliberalism) and on the results of own economic experiment examining the "free-riding" behaviour in the voluntary provision of public goods. The "free rider" problem is one of the main reasons for government intervention in the market. However, there is an inefficiency of public decision making on public provision and financing of selected goods because of the estimating goods values (ex-post consumer utility) problem. Moreover, the results of economic experiments do not support the pure "free rider" theory. However, the economic experiment simulates the real public good consumption that is why this paper contains also the survey of consumers' willingness to pay for specific public goods (public library services) in real terms based on the methodology of contingent valuation method.

There is a growing effort to find alternative measures of the overall performance of economy and social development. More complex indicators are constructed, multi-dimensional approaches are searched and concepts of subjective well-being are increasingly applied. While academic research is booming and politicians are interested about innovative approach in the West, not much attention is given to the topic in the Czech Republic. The article drafts some of many problems appearing on the interface of the objective and subjective indicators. In the first section, some multi-dimensional approaches are tackled and in the second, concepts of happiness and satisfaction are overviewed. The relationship between economic growth and human happiness is described next. In the fourth section, survey data on reported happiness in the Czech Republic, ready for analysis and comparison, are described. In the conclusion, perspectives of research in the area are outlined, together with a possible use of subjective indictors in policies.

Almost all of us sometimes voluntarily give up some scarce resources to make someone else better. Not only the amount of resources used for such purposes, but also other wider concerns (implications for private and government sector) have drawn the attention of economists in recent decades. In this paper I develop a theoretical framework underlying such activities, which can be in short termed as "altruistic". To do so, I first explain the notion of "altruism", as can be found in the works of Adam Smith, Gary Becker and Ludwig von Mises. On these grounds, we can say that by voluntary altruistic transactions the utility of both sides of the transaction has been increased. The main differences between the market and non-market sectors are described and the concept of "social entrepreneurship" is developed. The analysis is concluded by application of this theoretical framework to the case of altruism as a "public good".