J60 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers: GeneralReturn

The paper deals with the relationships between the inflow of FDI in the Czech economy and the Czech labour market. First part is focused on general issues related to the FDI inflows and to the analysis of the penetration of the foreign controlled companies into domestic economy. Special attendance is devoted to the scope and developments of the duality in the Czech economy, in particular in its key segment - manufacturing industry. The findings indicate gradual and differentiated diminishing of the scope of duality in the Czech manufacturing. The necessary conditions for positive spillovers of FDI into the domestic economy have been outlined, with flexible and qualified labour force being a very important channel of the transfer of technology. Therefore the impacts of FDI on the Czech labour market have been analyzed from the regional and industrial viewpoint. Low flexibility of the Czech labour market has been one of the reasons behind still considerable scope of duality in the Czech manufacturing.

One of the employer's problems in his relationship to the employee is limited enforceability of work-quality. There are two types of instruments: the employer has at hand while motivating employees for higher efficiency - higher wage as a carrot and monitoring as a stick. These two instruments can be mutually substitutable. The more costly the supervision is, the more convenient for the employer is to substitute it by the wage increase. The key determinant for wage level of individual employee is not only the labour productivity, which is usually considered, but the degree of monitoring costs as well. The above mentioned approach allows us to explain the existence of above-equilibrium wage level in the environment of rational behaviour. We are not dealing with a market failure, the employers maximize their profits. As a consequence there is involuntary unemployment on the labour market persisting in the long-run.

The situation on the labour market in East Germany is difficult since the beginning of economic transition in the early 90's. The reasons for such a situation are complex. The implementation of single currency, the collapse of East Germany's foreign trade, the privatization method and high wages should be mentioned above all. The macroeconomic reasons for the persistently high unemployment rate are supported by microeconomic reasons, too. The unification of Germany was not perceived as a unique chance to reform the outdated German labour market. Active labour market policy measures known from the old Federal Republic of Germany were not as effective as expected.

In this paper we explore how unemployment benefits and other social benefits affect work incentives in the Czech Republic. We test the link between replacement rates and reservation wages taking duration of unemployment into account and we specify validity of the outlined model using replacement rates and reservation wages recognised in the sample of the unemployed. We conclude that replacement rates are high only in case of specific family types (incomplete families and families with children where women have lost the job), low skilled categories of the unemployed. Reservation wages are linked mainly to the economic and social status of the unemployed and seem to be raised by replacement rates of benefits only with the category of the unskilled. Besides low efficiency of job search, insecurity of job tenure and insecurity of future benefits entitlements raise the price of the status of the unemployed and push reservation wages up.