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Salaries of Czech teachers remain low
Münich, Daniel ; Smolka, V.
Teacher salaries, in the long term, co-determine the quality of teachers and education in schools. The relative teachers’ pay compared with salaries in alternative professions in a country also determines what ranks prospective young teachers recruit from, which of them ultimately become teachers and whether the best of them sustain a long-term career in teaching. For long relative salaries of Czech teachers have been among the lowest among more than 30 most developed countries of the world (OECD). Also in 2015, as the study shows, increases in teacher salaries only hardly kept pace with the trend of salaries of other tertiary-educated public and private sector employees. In the last decade, the unfavourable relative pay situation of Czech teachers has effectively not changed.
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Quality of publication output of scientific fields in Slovakia: an international comparison
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Kozubek, Stanislav ; Münich, Daniel ; Škoda, Samuel
This study covers in detail the publication output in scientific journals in Slovakia, based on articles published in the years 2010 – 2014 and included in the Web of Science (WoS) database and compares it with the output of 11 different countries. For our comparison, we have used the narrowly defined scientific fields used by the WoS to categorize the journals included in the database. The study compares both total publication output and outstanding publication output, i.e. the number of articles published in top scientific journals in the given field, based on their reputation in the academia.
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A national comparison of the academic publication output of the Czech Academy of Sciences: quantity vs quality and co-authorship
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Kozubek, Stanislav ; Münich, Daniel ; Škoda, Samuel
This study maps out in detail the contribution made by the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) to the publication output of the Czech Republic for journals listed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The comparison covers not only the share of the total publication output, but also the share of the excellent publication output, i.e., publications in top-tier journals of respective fields enjoying the most academic prestige. A comparative look at the period 2010-2014 shows that in the vast majority of scientific fields with representation from the CAS scientific teams, the CAS is significantly more focused on publishing in the most prestigious international journals of the WoS database than are others in the Czech Republic. Research cooperation by the CAS in the form of co-authorship takes place at the national level in various fields with differing levels of intensity, as well as differing in the qualitative focus of such cooperation. The sources for this study include the unique bibliometric data processed during the 2015 exercise, the ‘R&D Evaluation of CAS units for 2010-2014’.\n\n
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Czech research centres' publication performance in the period 2009-2013, by field of research
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Kozubek, Stanislav ; Münich, Daniel ; Škoda, Samuel
Evaluating Czech research institutions is largely reduced to automatized scoring of R&D otputs. The sole exception is the practice of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The results of the government’s evaluation of research centres, in the form in which they are processed and officially presented to the public, have little informational value for the management of the R&D system and individual research workplaces. At the same time, the system (of data collection about the R&D results, verification and basic classification) offers several unused possibilities, to convey valuable information about the quantity and the quality of research workplaces' publication performance both to the academic community and to the broader public. Our overview exploits these possibilities for results published in journals listed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The presented comparison is an update of the IDEA study (2015), the publication performance comparison of Czech research centres, mainly of universities and institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences, in the period of 2009-2013. The underlying logic of the updated comparison, its advantages, disadvantages, limitations and shortcomings remain more or less the same as before, therefore we refer the reader to the detailed explanations in the aforementioned study. The main change from the previous comparison (besides shifting the five-year window by one year) is the usage of an alternative citation index: while our previous comparison differentiated results from journals by the Impact Factor index, the updated comparison uses the Article Influence Score, which weighs citations according to their importance.
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Impact of taxes and social benefits on income inequality and relative poverty in the Czech Republic
Janský, Petr ; Kalíšková, Klára ; Münich, Daniel
International comparisons have long shown that income inequality and the proportion of people at risk of relative poverty in the Czech Republic are among the lowest both in the EU and across the world's most developed countries (OECD). Data from representative surveys on household incomes and expenditures show that the Czech tax and social benefits system has rather little effect on income equality and the risk of poverty. Relatively low variation in gross income, for which the old-age pension system plays a key role, plays a greater part in maintaining the low rates of both measures. If besides direct taxes and social benefits we also take into account the effects of indirect taxation (value added tax and consumer taxes), then we find that the current system reduces income inequality relatively little, and in fact slightly increases the relative poverty risk. 80 % of those in relative poverty and 33 % of other individuals are in receipt of at least one social benefit. Only 38 % of total expenditures on state social support are spent on people who are at risk of relative income poverty. The most potentially effective benefits for reducing relative income inequality and overall poverty rates are benefits in material need (contributions towards basic living costs and accommodation). The most effective instrument for reducing the proportion of the population at risk of relative income poverty is child benefit.
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Public financing for pre-school places pays off: a cost and benefit analysis
Kalíšková, Klára ; Münich, Daniel ; Pertold, Filip
Countrywide statistics suggest that the long-term shortage of places in state preschool institutions (kindergartens) has become gradually less severe over the past few years thanks to population decline, and that in future there will be sufficient places available at pre-schools. Nevertheless at a local level demand is still far outstripping supply in many places, and this is unlikely to change as internal migration and other demographic changes continue. Our analysis of financial costs and benefits reveals that the shortage of places in preschools in the past decade has led to an undeniable net loss for the public budget. Our analysis demonstrates that the net gain to the public budget from every additional place in pre-school is on average 10,000 crowns per year. Public financial support for pre-schools would not result in a loss even under very conservative estimates. On the contrary, the net gains are in fact far higher if the indirect and long-term consequences of supporting further places in pre-schools are taken into account.
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An international comparison of the quality of academic publication output in the Czech Republic
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Kozubek, Stanislav ; Münich, Daniel ; Škoda, Samuel
In our recent study (IDEA No. 5/20154) we have compared the publication output of various Czech research institutions by individual disciplines. The comparison was based on the relative output of institutions working in specific science branches within the Czech Republic, and had no way of indicating which institutions in the Czech Republic were on par with international research and which were lagging behind. Even though an institution is not at the top in its field within the Czech Republic, the quality of its research may still be on par with international research, as the particular branch of science is highly advanced in the Czech Republic. Therefore, this study is a first step toward comparing the research output of Czech institutions on an international level. We have compared the publication output of entire scientific fields in the Czech Republic to the same fields in other countries, basing our comparison on articles published in the years 2010–2014 and included in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The comparison includes eleven small and medium-sized countries, only one of which has English as its official language: five European countries belonging to the so-called former Soviet bloc, four Western European countries, and two non-European countries.
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An international comparison of the quality of academic publication output in the Czech Republic
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Kozubek, Stanislav ; Münich, Daniel ; Škoda, Samuel
In the recent study Jurajda a Münich (2015) we presented a field-by-field comparison of Czech research publication output. This comparison of the relative strength of output by research institutes in each field within the Czech Republic (CR), could not comment on which Czech institutes are working at international level, and which lag behind their foreign counterparts. It is possible, for example, that an institute that is not at the forefront of its field in the CR may nevertheless be performing research at a standard comparable with international competitors, because it is working in a field in which the Czech Republic is performing very high level research. In this study we offer a first step towards comparing the research output of Czech institutes on an international scale: we compare the publication output of each research field, overall, in the Czech Republic with its international equivalent. Our comparison is based on articles published between 2010 and 2014 which are included in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The comparison includes eleven small and medium sized countries, only one of which has English as its native language. Five of the countries are European countries previously within the Soviet bloc, four are Western European countries and two are non-European countries.
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A comparative study of retirement age in the Czech Republic
Bakalová, Jana ; Boháček, Radim ; Münich, Daniel
Our analysis reveals that older generations in the Czech Republic still exhibit\nsome differences from more developed countries in Western and Northern\nEurope. Socio-economic conditions, educational attainment, occupational\nstructure, or health status are still lower due to reasons related to historical\ndevelopment in the 20th century. On the other hand, improvements and\nconvergence of aforementioned characteristics to more economically\ndeveloped countries of the EU during a relatively short period of time has been\nnotable.
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Czech research centres' publication performance in the period 2008-2012, by field of research
Jurajda, Štěpán ; Münich, Daniel
Three years ago, we were the first in the Czech Republic to offer, in IDEA study 3/2012, a comparison of research publication performance (not productivity) based on data about the results of research and development in the period 2006-2010 for the research fields whose ouputs are largely recorded in the Web of Science database run by Thomson Reuters (WoS). For each field of research, we showed which Czech centre has the most results published in journals with a high impact factor (IF). In this study, we bring that comparison up to date for the period 2008-2012. This type of comparison, which is based on the Information Register of R&D Results [Rejstřík informací o výsledcích] (RIV) collated by the government's Council for Research, Development and Innovation (RVVI), identifies the research centres with the most prolific output of excellent results in a given field in the Czech Republic. It also enables us to compare fields in terms of the concentration of their journal publication output in individual research centres, and to look at the relationship between "points-based" RIV assessment and excellence of results.
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