J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant WorkersReturn

Immigration is a controversial and vital issue that has become an acute problem for countries facing cultural and economic difficulties resulting from it, and unemployment is at the forefront of these difficulties. According to theory, migration causes unemployment; thus, the causality relationship between migration and unemployment is empirically ex- amined in our study. For this purpose, we used a new test known as the Panel Fourier Toda-Yamamoto (PFTY) method for the period 1990-2019, which contributes to the existing literature from a methodological standpoint. This test allows investigating multiple structural breaks, cross-section dependence and country heterogeneity. Our first test results show that when we use the Dumitrescu-Hurlin (2012) test, the causal relationship is confirmed neither for any country nor the entire panel. However, when we employ the PFTY test, we reach causality runs from migration to unemployment for the entire panel and four countries.

How well can a society and an economy face up to COVID-19 depends, among other factors, on how many jobs can be performed at home. Work from home has the potential to increase firms' productivity and quality of workers' lives regardless of COVID-19, but it can also create new challenges. In this paper, we estimate the share of Czech workers who could work from home, using detailed Czech labour force survey data and an internationally recognised occupational classification methodology. Overall, we apply in the Czech context a methodology developed by Dingel and Neiman and published by the Journal of Public Economics in 2020. Our results show that about one third of Czech workers can perform their jobs from home. This share is comparable with countries at similar per capita income levels and with the share of workers who worked from home in Czechia during COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. The ability to work from home is distributed unequally across sectors, regions and workers' education levels. Whereas around four fifths of workers in the financial or the information technology sectors can work from home, less than one in five workers in agriculture and culture can work from home. Most university-educated workers can work from home, but only one in ten workers with primary education can do so. About a half of the workers in Prague can work from home, while only about a quarter can do so in the rest of the Czech Republic.

As of 2015, the yearly number of live births in the Czech Republic will probably be lower than the number of deaths. Latest population forecast, presented by the Czech Statistical Office in 2013, shows that without permanent international immigration the population of the Czech Republic would decrease. The paper presents the results of our own population forecast, which takes into account the recent fertility increase observed in 2013-2015, and the replacement migration concept, i.e. the estimate of the amount of annual net migration needed to stabilize the Czech Republic population size at its current size (10.6 million of inhabitants) until the end of this century. Three different scenarios of future fertility levels are assumed. We also compare our results with the population forecast without migration and with constant net migration. Additionally to the population forecast itself, we present future trends in the productive, post-productive and old-age population, and compute old-age dependency ratios. We define the upper threshold of the productive age in agreement with the increasing retirement age in the Czech Republic. Based on our findings, we conclude that immigration is not able to stop the population ageing process as such, but can partially eliminate its consequences. Possible opportunities, as well as migration risks, are also discussed.

The existing empirical studies examined the impact of different variables, such as common language, economic, cultural and geographical factors, on migration. However, none of the studies deals with the social security systems including their coordination as a relevant explanatory factor. The paper focuses on the social security systems in Europe, their mutual coordination and their influence on international migration. The influence of social systems on economic migration can be twofold: infl uencing the labour migration, i.e. migrants who move for work, and also influencing the benefit migration, i.e. migrants who move in order to receive social benefits. We present the advanced migration model extended by the factors of social security coordination. The main finding is that the labour migration prevails significantly over the benefit migration. Role of social systems as social magnets was not proved to be statistically significant.

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.