H55 - Social Security and Public PensionsReturn

The main topic of the paper is a comparison of maternity benefits in the Czech Republic and Poland. The first part is dedicated to the definition and description of maternity leave and its grounding in the social security systems of both countries, based on the current legislation in both countries. Next, the maternity benefits in the Czech Republic and Poland are presented in tables which yields interesting results for the observed period. The third part represents the core of the paper – comparison of the maternity benefits in the Czech Republic and Poland. The expenditures in both countries in the observed period 2010-2019, including their proportion to the total social security expeditures, as well as birth rates in the said time period, are graphically presented in this part. In the final part, the obtained data are evaluated and the results of the comparison are discussed.

With the ongoing reversal of the population pyramid in the foreground, this paper designs a framework for assessing the intergenerational redistribution due to collective pension, healthcare, and education system funding in the Czech Republic. Employing the generational accounting method for locking the fiscal policy in the base year and deriving individual lifetime net tax payments, overall generational contributions are calculated. This work sheds light on who benefits from and who loses out in the 2015 calibration of the system. The losses are expected for those currently young or yet unborn. The increasing aged dependency ratio puts pressure on the productive population as well as on public finance which results in considerable value transfers from young generations to their predecessors. Such scheme levies – through tax implications of dependency – a high burden of contribution on the population which will be productive especially around the time forty years from now.

Temporary rules for indexation of old-age public pensions in the Czech Republic were introduced for the period between 2013 and 2015. The pensions are now indexed only according to the sum of a third of the wage growth and a third of price inflation. This is by two thirds of price inflation lower than in 2012. This article empirically evaluates impact of this change on expected values of pensions and compares it with seven alternative proposals. The analysis estimates that pensions will be by 5% lower by 2015 in comparison to the earlier rules for indexation. The implemented change is the third lowest indexation out of the eight evaluated proposals. One of the main findings is that temporary changes can have an important impact beyond the short run. The temporary lower growth of pensions during the three years is naturally reflected in lower expected values of pensions and in lower public expenditures in the subsequent years.