Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 4/2013

Generally, households are, from the viewpoint of macroeconomic data, among the last to feel the impact of an economic crisis, as a rule. After two years (2010 and 2011) of the GDP's positive growth rates, the Czech economy went down again in 2012. This article shows the households' response to such turbulences. Long time series enable us to compare the households' behaviour in the period 2009 through 2012 with that of the late 1990s.

Keywords
Households, economic crisis, indebtedness of households, consumption by households

Regional gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is one of the key indicators describing the level of regional economic disparities in individual countries. Besides it is used for international comparison as indicator for distribution of structural funds in the European Union. The aim of this article is to analyse possible methods of regional allocation of GDP on the basis of existing rules within the EU and in the Czech Republic. The scale of rules allows application of different methods and offers more varieties of conceptual approaches to regional allocation of GDP. First of all either income or production method is used exclusively for each industry in dif­ferent countries differently, depending on data availability. Subsequently, possibility of expenditure approach is added. In cases of all methods there exist weaknesses, e.g. regional distribution of revenues or operating surpluses in cases of multi-regional companies and different methods of allocation mean a distinct regional view of overall economic performance.

Keywords
Regional accounts, regional GDP, gross value added

The productivity measurement constitutes an important part of economic analysis. It is always connected to a competitiveness analysis of a country. Labour productivity represents one of the most suitable measurements for compiling the composite indicators which measure multidimensional concepts that single indicators are unable to capture. In the first part, this paper identifies global competitiveness index and global competitiveness index as two main competitiveness composite indicators. After that the methodological issues of composite indicators and labour productivity is discussed. Finally, using the regression analysis this paper investigates composite indicators along with the labour productivity of EU members in the period between the years 2010 and 2011 to identify whether the composite indicators are necessary in the competitiveness analyses.

Keywords
Composite indicator, global competitiveness index, labour productivity, world competitiveness index

Population ageing will considerably influence economic and social structure of the population. The labour market will change completely. The lower number of persons in productive age and the rise of proportion of older age groups will speed up ageing after 2030. The future development of labour market will face a challenge of reduction of the negative initial demographic conditions. The main problem of the labour market in the Czech Republic is the exclusion of all groups of population due to the lack of flexible jobs, mainly part-time jobs (for example students, mothers with children and elderly people). The analysis shows a possible way of measuring these reserves on the labour market. The comparison with labour indicators (mainly specific em­ployment rates by gender and age) of other European countries is the aim of this approach. This offers a pos­sibility to construct the scenarios of the future development in the Czech Republic.

Keywords
Population ageing, labour force survey, economic status, labour market

In the Czech Republic there has been invested a lot of money to the human capital through the European Social Fund. The Human Resources and Employment Operational Programme plays an important role by providing subsidies for the training of employees and an introduction of modern forms of management and human resource development.
This paper summarizes the application of the regression discontinuity method to test whether there is an impact of EU assistance on employment in supported firms in 2009. The estimations were conducted with a sample with 1 176 supported and 87 rejected applicants. The estimation results suggest that the impacts of the intervention on employment is positive and statistically significant. The employment change in supported firms was on average about 10–15 p.p. higher than in unsupported firms.

Keywords
Counterfactual impact evaluation, regression discontinuity design, European Social Fund, employment

This paper investigates the relationship between government expenditure on education and labour force par­ticipation rate over the period 1970–2010 in Mediterranean economies of Europe area, usually refer to PIGS economies. The study employs a Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) to briefly describe some evidence on function­ing and dynamics of labour markets and to evaluate the efficiency of use of knowledge as strategy to increase the growth. The DEA results of PIGS are compared with DEA on three developed economies of Europe (UK, Netherlands and France). In addition, the paper uses a time series approach to investigate the long term rela­tionship between human capital and its employability applying the vector autoregressive (VAR) method and the Granger-Causality test. It has been found that the investment in education could be a prerequisite for sus­tainable growth and make it easier to achieve societal objectives, especially in the weakest growing countries.

Keywords
Human capital, expenditure on education, data envelope analysis, granger-causality test, VAR

Book Review
MAREK, L. et al. Statistika v Příkladech. 1^st edition. Prague: Professional Publishing, 2013. ISBN 978-80-7431-118-5.

Celebrations of the 60^th anniversary of the birth of University of Economics in Prague (VŠE) this autumn is a good opportunity to mention the beginning of activities of statisticians at this university. The article deals with the establishment of Statistical Department in historic relations and its development and activities in the first 15 years. We prepare other contributions extending the assessment of activities of statisticians at the University of Economics in the following decades and dealing with the latest work results of Statistical Departments at the University of Economics.