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

Poverty reduction has long been one of the political priorities of the European Union and its member states. Despite the political declarations and measures applied, poverty is still a phenomenon that affects the everyday lives of about 70 million Europeans. Moreover, trends in poverty incidence show how poverty risks are sensitive to overall socio-economic development and how they are more actual for some vulnerable population groups. Following the popular concept of poverty feminization, the analysis presented in the paper aims to identify gender perspective relationship between the poverty incidence and characteristics describing the situation on the labour market or the levels of attained education in EU-27 countries. Attention is paid to poverty incidence among women and men of working age (population aged from 25 to 54 years) and differences are examined in the relationship to the position of both genders on the labour market. Presented findings, based mainly on the results obtained from the panel regression analysis performed for the period 2007-2020, suggest that policymakers should integrate a gender perspective into all policies focused on poverty reduction.

This paper provides an up-to-date analysis of the redistributive effects of the Czech tax and benefit system at the household level. We provide several measures of the extent in which the tax and benefit system redistributes from the rich to the poor and from the childless households to the households with children. We find a rather weak combined power of the tax and benefit systems in alleviating income inequalities. The system redistributes primarily towards households with children. While households with children earn 55 per cent of total earnings, they pay 39 per cent of total taxes and receive 68 per cent of total benefits. Even the richest households with children contribute a lower share of total net taxes (8 per cent) than their share in total earnings (10 per cent). About a quarter of households with children in the upper income deciles collect some benefits while only half of the poorest households without children do.

This paper aims to quantify the impact of social benefits on labour market participation in the Czech Republic and provides a comparison with selected European countries. It applies the logistic regression to estimate the probability of labour market participation depending on social benefits related to net wage of the individuals, controlling for individual and household characteristics. Our results indicate that the work disincentives via social benefits do exist in most of the included countries and they proved to be relatively strong in the Czech Republic. When trying to understand the reasons for recently decreasing participation rate in the Czech Republic, the often called ""generous"" Czech social benefit system appears to be relevant.

In this paper, we analyse the Czech social and tax systems and their impact on income distribution. We use regular household surveys, organized and published by the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), for years 1999 - 2002. This longer time span allows us to identify some trends in the Czech social security system and their impact on well-being of various income groups. We find that while the total cost of the Czech social security system were not escalating in the period of 1999 - 2002, the illness benefit - already the largest spending programme - rose by enormous 72 % in these four years. This largesse failed, however, to improve income of the poorest households as the benefit is very inefficient in increasing income of the poorest households. We also find that spending on more focused programmes (social supplement and parental allowance) increased least. Last but not least, we analysed the impact of tax deductions on the income distribution in the Czech Republic. These deductions represent a massive transfer, comparable to all social benefits combined. Our analysis shows, that the impact of tax deductions on income of the poorest decile fell significantly over the period of 1999 - 2002.