|
|
Teachers' salaries in 2019: a glimpse of a brighter future?
Münich, Daniel ; Smolka, Vladimír
As far as the relative level of pay for teachers compared to other university-educated employees is concerned, the Czech Republic has long occupied a very low position relative to other developed countries. As recently as 2018, the country ranked lowest on this front among all the OECD countries. The relative level of teachers’ pay is one of the factors that determine the attractiveness of the teaching profession. The teaching profession needs to be attractive not only in order to ensure a sufficient supply of teaching staff but also to enable selectivity in teacher recruitment, with an emphasis on teacher quality. The national data for 2019, which have recently been published and on which this study is based, show that this situation has begun to improve substantially. If the pledges originally made by the current government are anything to go by, this situation ought to further improve substantially during 2020 and 2021. In 2019 primary school teachers’ average pay reached 123.5% of the average salary in the national economy, up from 114.3% in 2018. This means that teachers’ relative pay level exceeded the previous record, which was set almost fifteen years ago in 2006. The speed of increase in teachers’ salaries in 2019 was far greater than the speed of increase in the salaries of other university-educated public sector employees and very substantially greater than that in the private sector. During 2018-2019 teachers’ mean and median pay rose by more than 28%. The equivalent growth among university-educated employees in the public sector was 19.8% and in the private sector just 14,1%.\n
|
|
|
Stigma as a self-fulfilling prophecy? An experiment in the Czech prisons
Cingl, L. ; Korbel, Václav
Prison inmates face many problems after their release which may hinder their reintegration into society. Discrimination from the society can lead among the inmates to the creation of a stigma of an ex-inmate. In such a situation, the history of the prison sentence is a source of shame and prejudice from the side of society. It can further lead to a loss of motivation and self-confidence, and ultimately to an increase in the probability of recidivism. The goal of our project was to investigate whether inmates currently serving a sentence expect stigmatization from people out of prison. Another goal was to test whether a light-touch psychological intervention targeting the self-confidence can reduce the effects of stigma. We tested our research questions on a sample of 297 male inmates from 15 Czech prisons using methods of experimental economics. Inmates made decisions involving trust and altruism in situations which simulate interactions with the general society so that we could measure the expectations of inmates about the attitudes they have. Our results show that inmates do not expect stigmatization. On the contrary, they expect a similar level of trust and even a more altruistic behavior from the general society than towards non-prisoners. Since inmates do not expect to be stigmatized, the psychological intervention did change neither beliefs nor behavior. The fact that prisoners do not expect stigmatization can be regarded as positive for their future reintegration. On the other hand, some inmates reported overly optimistic beliefs\nregarding the behavior of the general society. It could be one of the reasons why they do not prepare adequately for the release and subsequently recidivate. Further research should shed light, whether overly optimistic beliefs can negatively affect prospects for reintegration.
|
|
|
The consumption tax as a dichotomy: source of public budgets and instrument of harm reduction\n(discussion paper)
Novák, Vladimír ; Šoltés, Michal
The tax system is an essential economic policy instrument used to finance public budgets and influence the economic behavior of individuals, households, and companies. Different tax liabilities on certain forms of consumption (e.g., more ecological forms of transport, less harmful tobacco products) is in the public interest, if they incentivize consumers to replace more harmful forms of consumption with less harmful options. Such tax liability differentiation can result in harm reduction without reducing overall consumption levels. Tax differentiation based on the potential harm of the consumption needs to take into account the extent to which it will discourage existing consumers from the more harmful forms of consumption and the extent to which it will attract new consumers, who would otherwise not consume the product at all. Attempts to use excise taxation to finance public budgets and as an instrument to encourage consumers to adopt less harmful behaviors have been observed in many countries over the past decade.
|
|
|
International comparison of school principals: Czech administrative hell
Federičová, Miroslava
School leadership is a serious problem in the Czech Republic. In this study, we document how a number of extremes converge at the level of elementary school leadership in the Czech Republic: (i) schools have substantial autonomy, (ii) school principals labour under very large administrative burdens, (iii) the average new principal is insufficiently prepared for the role, (iv) principals’ salaries are relatively low and insufficient to attract strong candidates, and (v) there are a very large number of small schools, necessitating a large number of principals. This unhealthy combination of factors generates a significant problem for Czech schooling, of which only a narrow circle of experts has thus far been aware. For this reason, little progress has been made towards considering how problems might be solved or at least minimised.
|
|
|
Private and public returns to business R&D spending in Czechia
Pleticha, Petr
This study presents the first estimates of the relationship between business R&D capital and value added by sector in Czechia. The goal is to assess both direct effects of R&D spending in respective industries, and indirect, spillover effects on the rest of economy. We apply well-established regression approaches, using sectoral data from manufacturing and selected service sectors from 1996 to 2015. Because R&D spending and public R&D subsidies have soared in recent years, such an analysis has been long overdue.
|
|
|
Czech teachers’ pay: a new hope
Münich, Daniel ; Smolka, V.
Teachers’ pay has long been lower in the Czech Republic than in almost all the other most economically developed countries. That is a natural consequence of the fact that the Czech Republic spends around one third less of its gross domestic product (GDP) on regional schooling than is usual in developed countries.\nIf Czech teachers’ average monthly salary was, relative to the salaries of other tertiary educated employees in the Czech Republic in 2018, comparable to the equivalent ratio in EU countries on average or in Finland or Germany, it should stand at around 53,000 or 56,000 CZK rather than the current 36,000 CZK.\nRelative to the average salary in the national economy, average teachers’ salaries rose year on year in 2018 by 2.9 percentage points to nearly 115%. Nevertheless, this only marked a return to the levels of 2008, i.e. ten years ago, prior to the global financial crisis. Teachers’ salaries were raised substantially in 2017-2018, but at the same time salaries for all tertiary educated employees rose substantially across the whole public sector. The raise in teachers’ salaries was thus hardly ahead of the game.\nIn relative terms, teachers at the beginning of their careers in the under 30 age bracket are the best paid. In 2018, ‘only’ 69% of non-teachers in this age group received higher salaries than their teacher peers (tertiary educated, same age and gender in the same region). Next best is the situation among the oldest teachers, in the 50-59 and 60+ age brackets. Teachers in the middle age bracket, 30-49 years, receive the worst pay in relative terms: 80% of demographically equivalent employees earn more than the teachers’ average salary.\nCzech teachers’ salaries are highly equalized, or even egalitarian, both in national and international comparison. In the youngest age bracket the variability in pay is comparable with that of administrative staff and other university educated public sector employees. However, whereas pay grades and variability increase with age (and experience) among non-teachers, teachers’ pay rises extremely slowly with age (experience) and its variability remains low.\nIn 2018 the already low share of overall teachers’ pay allocated to merit-based bonuses decreased. The substantial raise to teachers’ salaries in that year was achieved partially at the expense of further reducing the already very low levels of merit-based pay.\nUnder Bohuslav Sobotka’s government in 2014-2017, raising teachers’ pay was not a priority above and beyond increasing salaries across the whole public sector more generally. A turn for the better in this respect only became apparent during the first year of the new government in 2018. Further development on this front is however still in the realm of promises, or at best rough estimates for 2019.\nThe pre-election pledges made by ČSSD and ANO in this area are not mutually comparable. While ČSSD took the average salary in the national economy in 2021 as the basis for its calculations, the second took average teachers’ salaries in 2017. Thus, in 2021 teachers should be paid 49,530 CZK per month according to ČSSD and 47,367 CZK according to ANO. The latter figure was adopted into the government’s statement of policy. However, ANO’s promise is problematic because it does not anticipate the concurrent growth of salaries in other professions, which can only be broadly predicted.\nIf teachers’ pay were to increase by 7.5% annually from 2020 onwards, the level of teachers’ pay relative that of other tertiary educated public sector employees in the Czech Republic would match the equivalent ratio across the EU as a whole only in 2030, i.e. a decade from now. To reach the relative levels in Germany or Finland would take 13-15 years.\nPrevious political promises in the more distant past regarding raises to teachers’ pay were vague, short-lived and rarely fulfilled. The consequence of that has been to substantially reduce the public’s belief in such pledges. In order to permanently and substantially increase the long existing low level of interest in the teaching profession among the youngest generations these pledges must be given greater credibility. It is not only essential that the current commitments be fulfilled, but also that they be extended well beyond a single term of election. Help in achieving this may come through key political parties declaring their consensus, the introduction of statutory salary indexation for teachers and a more responsible approach to compiling the mid-term state budget outlook.
|
|
|
Predatory publications in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin
The paper maps the infiltration of so-called “predatory” scholarly journals into the citation database Scopus. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived ISSNs of the respective journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with it. A total of 324 matched journals with 164 thousand documents indexed in Scopus over 2015-2017, making up a share of 2.8 % of the total articles have been identified. An analysis of cross-country differences in the tendency to publish in these journals reveals that overall the most affected are middle-income countries in Asia and North Africa. Kazakhstan is the country with the largest tendency to publish in predatory journals (18 %). More than 5 % is reported in 20 countries, including large countries such as Indonesia (18 %), Malaysia (11 %), India (10 %), or Nigeria (7 %). Neither developed countries are resistant to predatory publishing. More than 16 000 “potentially predatory” articles were published by authors from United States (0.67 %).
|
|
|
Employment effects of minimum wage increases in the Czech Republic
Grossmann, J. ; Jurajda, Štěpán ; Smolka, V.
This study examines the direct effects of four minimum wage increases in the Czech Republic during 2012-2017 on the employment of low-earning workers in the business sector. This series of minimum wage increases followed a period of 7 years during which the national minimum wage was not raised. During the period studied, the monthly minimum wage was raised by 37.5 % overall, from 8,000 to 11,000 CZK. To estimate the effects of the minimum wage increases we make use of the fact that various companies or parts of companies reported different shares of employees who were paid at or below the level of the new minimum wage. We estimate whether, within a given company, homogeneous groups of employees in which a greater proportion were previously paid less than the new minimum wage were disproportionately badly affected in terms of their employment (or hours worked) after the change than groups of employees unaffected by the raise to the minimum wage. Our results show that the national minimum wage increases in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017 did not have any significant negative effects on employment. They did, however, have a positive effect on salaries. Even at the start of 2019, the minimum wage in the Czech Republic remains low in comparison to other European countries and affects only a small proportion of workers. Our findings however cannot be taken as an indication that potential future minimum wage increases would also have negligible effects on employment. It is thus essential to regularly assess in detail what the effects of future increases to the minimum wage would be.
|
|
|
The school homework load in the Czech Republic and in international comparison
Korbel, Václav ; Münich, Daniel
This study does not aspire to detect any causal effects of HW on pupils’ school outcomes nor any other desirable or adverse aspects of HW. Nevertheless, we show that the estimated (non-causal) relationship between HW load and pupils’ results is substantially different depending on whether we look at differences between countries, between schools or within schools. We thus illustrate that simplified or even ignorant presumptions about these relationships may lead to mistaken conclusions, for example that greater HW loads causally worsen pupils’ results, which it might be tempting to assume on the basis of international comparisons. This study’s findings reveal that Czech pupils have a very low HW load in comparison to pupils from other countries. This does not, however, automatically mean that Czech teachers should start to give their pupils more HW. First of all, there is no evidence, even from other countries, that greater HW loads automatically improve learning outcomes. Second, debates about HW load tend to disregard other key questions related to the amount of HW suitable in the local educational context. While providing answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this current study, these should be the subject of further research and expert debate. Good teachers should, furthermore, be capable of assessing the suitability or otherwise of setting HW in their particular local and educational contexts.
|
|
| |
guest ::
