Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

The intervention Allowance for school-leaver practice performance is in Slovakia one of the active labour market policy instruments aimed at unemployed young school-leavers. It was put into practice to enable young jobseekers to gain their first contact with the labour market and first work experience and habits. As the state budget and EU social funds are used to finance this intervention, there is a natural need to evaluate its outcomes. In this study, the evaluation is carried out by a counterfactual approach. To cope with the problem of selection bias, the method of an instrumental variable is used. The results show that the intervention has a short to medium-term impact on the employability and a significant positive impact on wages. The results of this study have the potential to be used by the policymakers to create the conditions for the effective functioning of the measure and eligibility of the participants.

We explored the patterns of structural changes in Europe and found growing relevance of the service sector, particularly knowledge-intensive services. The study shows that labour productivity and TFP growth were lower in the service sector than in the goods sector but were higher in knowledge-intensive services than in other services. GDP per capita growth is positively related to the output’s share of knowledge-intensive services as well as GDP growth and TFP growth in high-income countries, but not in medium-income economies. This might be explained by the rapid growth in the earlier stages of development in less-developed countries and its subsequent slowdown. Although knowledge-intensive services are the fastest growing sector in all countries, industry is still the most relevant sector for long-term growth, with the highest TFP and labour productivity growth. The growing knowledge-intensive services sector, with its higher TFP growth than other services, partially overcomes the negative effects of expansion of the service sector on long-term output growth. This study shows that R&D investment growth leads to significantly higher output growth in knowledge-intensive services than in other sectors, which may be used as a relevant policy tool.

The aim of this research was to find out which factors influenced people who originally planned a summer holiday when surveyed at the time of pandemic peak and at the time of pandemic remission. The research was conducted on a representative sample of population of Slovakia surveyed via agency. Binary logistic regression has revealed that out of 18 tested demographic, economic, social and psychological variables, the intention to not go on a summer holiday at the time of pandemic peak was predicted by level of income deterioration, worries about Covid-19, subjective feeling of isolation and gender. At the time of the pandemic remission only two predictors were significant: worries about income deterioration and the subjective feeling of isolation. The lasting effect of the subjective feeling of isolation and the missing effect of personal psychological characteristics are discussed.

The unemployment rate is considered to be one of the essential characteristics of the state of the economy. Unemployment duration can also describe the situation in the labour market. There are two sources of data on the duration of unemployment in the Czech Republic – data from the Labour Force Sample Survey provided by the Czech Statistical Office (aggregated or individual data) and aggregated data from the database of registered unemployed people held by labour offices under the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Two parametric lognormal distribution is used to model the distribution of durations quarterly from 1Q 2000 to 2Q 2019. The maximum likelihood estimates of parameters are found from individual data taking into account censored (incomplete observations) when observing unemployment duration; the minimum chi-squared method is used to estimate parameters from aggregated data. Time series of estimated parameters from different data sources, estimation procedures and data types are presented and compared. The relationship between the rate of unemployment and the duration of unemployment is shown.

The paper aims to highlight the importance of services as an integral component of international trade and, in particular, to identify structural determinants affecting their balance. The analysis is made using panel regression for 1980 – 2016 and includes all the world countries. The text is based on approaches of international trade theory concerning specific features associated with services. Significant factors affecting the balance of services include the presence of foreign direct investment, financial sector development level, geographic factors, human capital stock and interaction between the balance of services and balance of goods.