REFORMING HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES IN POLAND - An overview

The transformations taking place in Poland aim, among others, at adapting the system to new conditions of a market economy. The irrationality of funding social services by the budget made it necessary to restrict the role played by the State in their funding. It means the need for changes concerning not only institutional reforms but also new sources of income. The goal of this paper is to present the main directions of reforms occurring in the Polish economy on the example of health care. The paper concentrates on the problems of implementation, the reform in health care, its reasons and consequences. The trends indicate that the process of reforms is going in the direction of developing new methods and forms of funding and reducing the share of budgetary funds in the funding of social services. The state responsible for the reforms makes an attempt to create appropriate legal and organizational conditions for the question of institutions providing social services.     

Classification schemes and the study of social mobility: A detailed examination of the Blau-Duncan categories

The Blau-Duncan system of seventeen occuptational categories has frequently been used as the basis for the study of social mobility patterns in the contemporary United States. In this paper, we examine the validity of these categories by subdividing them in various ways and examining the mobility flows in this more detailed classification. Initial log-linear and cluster analyses using data from the Occupational Changes in a Generation II (OCG-II) survey suggest that the Blau-Duncan scheme hides certain patterns of social structuration, and we form new classification systems on the basis of these results. However, cross-validation analyses using the cumulative General Social Survey data set show that the improvements associated with our schemes do not generalize beyond the OCG-II data. Thus, we recommend continued use of the Blau-Duncan categories, given that they have been employed so often in previous work.     

Recast directive on European works councils: cosmetic surgery or substantial progress?

Overdue by nine years, contested by employers and awaited by trade unions, a review of the European works council Directive 94/45/EC finally became reality in 2009. This article presents background information about the positions of the European social partners and other institutional EU actors in order to understand the outcome of the events of 2008–09. Focus is directed towards providing a general overview of the new elements in the recast directive on European works councils (EWCs). Keeping the different views on EWCs of the social partners in perspective, the article argues that the recast directive, despite its shortcomings, represents progress rather than superficial cosmetic surgery.     

Changes in living conditions in Poland under economic transition

This paper presents changes in living conditions which have taken place in Polish provinces during the transformation period. To define the changes, 31 measures grouped into 12 fields have been established representing some basic aspects of living conditions. They years 1990 and 1994 were taken as the period of comparison. For analysis of changes in the value of living conditions, indicators were made using the statistical measures of dispersion, dynamics, and a graphic method. The average standard of living has decreased by 4.5 of one percentage point. Among 49 administrative provinces in Poland, only seven noted an increase. It is concluded that there are growing regional disparities in the living conditions of Polish people     

Structural heterogeneity or asymmetric shocks? Poland and the euro area through the lens of a two-country DSGE model

This paper presents a two-country model linking Poland and the euro area and applies it for assessment of heterogeneity across these two regions. Overall, our results can be seen as rather inconclusive about the differences in parameters describing agents' decision-making in Poland and in the euro area. On the contrary, we find strong evidence for heterogeneity in terms of volatility and synchronization of shocks hitting both economies. Our results may be viewed as a step towards estimating the costs of Poland's entry to the European Monetary Union, associated with giving up the monetary autonomy and losing benefits from stabilizing movements of the exchange rate.     

Maximum likelihood estimators of the dagum model parameters

This paper will show the sample size needed to provide good maximum likelihood estimators of the Dagum model parameters. The principal goal of this study is to verify the asymptotic properties of these estimators for finite sample sizes comparable to the ones employed in the real surveys (for example, the Labor Force Survey).     

Evolutionary models in economics: a survey of methods and building blocks

This paper assesses methods and components of formal evolutionary-economic modelling. Methods are broadly classified into evolutionary game theory and selection dynamics, evolutionary computation and multi-agent models, each with relevant subcategories. The components or building blocks are organized into diversity, innovation, selection, bounded rationality, diffusion, path dependency and lock-in, coevolution, multilevel and group selection, and mechanisms of growth. The number of alternatives that has been proposed for each category is vast, making it difficult to comprehend the variety of assumptions and formalizations underlying existing evolutionary-economic models. Our survey aims to clarify for each model component the choice range, formal expressions, associated assumptions, and possible techniques for formalization. Our study is unique in that it provides more information about the formal details of specific model components and is considerably more inclusive than earlier reviews.     

Responses to monetary policy shocks in the east and the west of Europe: a comparison

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central–eastern Europe. We mitigate the small‐sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines information across countries. The impulse responses in the NMS are broadly similar to those in the euro area countries. There is some evidence that in the NMS, which have had higher and more volatile inflation, the Phillips curve is steeper than in the euro area countries. This finding is consistent with economic theory. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.