Unemployment Poland

Otto Kaufmann studied law and political sciences. Doctorate degree in law postdoctoral lecture and research qualification, Habilitation, HDR. He is currently employed as a Senior Research Fellow with the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law, Munich, and teaches at Robert Schuman de Strasbourg, where he has been associate professor since 1998, and Rennes 1 universities. He has moreover held guest lectures at various universities, e.g. in 2006 and 2007, at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, on the subject of European policies and labour and social security law. His fields of activity above all include German and French labour and social security law, as well as international and European social law. Focal point of his research are comparative law social relations junctions and boundaries between labour and social law sickness insurance, invalidity and old-age protection, notably supplementary and employment-related schemes juridical comparisons of occupational pension plans unemployment, employability, exclusion, and labour policies in comparative studies. Many of his publications deal with labour and social law issues from a comparative law perspective, as well as... 

The collapse of heavy industry was more severe in industrial regions (Silesia in Poland, Magnitogorsk in Russia, Donets in Ukraine). Generally speaking, citizens of Poland and the Czech Republic suffered less from the transition than people from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Current unemployment rates, life expectancies, and infantmortality continue to document the differences. The division of Czechoslovakia resulted in the formation of the Czech and Slovakian Republics as independent states, both of which became members of the European Union. 

In the former analysis of road safety trends in Poland - due to the unavailability of traffic data, and to the occurrence of two economic breakdowns in 2001 and 2007 onwards - researchers tomed to economic factors to explain the simultaneous decrease that occurred in the trend of the number of fatalities in Poland - as in other countries in Europe. Variables such as the GDP and unemployment rate have been used for modeling changes in the number of fatalities in the short- or medium term... 

A structural model of periodic (monthly) discrete time series consists of three basic components the seasonal component, the trend and the irregular interference. It can then be extended according to the needs of the situation in orrr case, explanatory variables and interventions are added in order to determine the effect of the selected factors on the nrrmber of fatalities in Poland over the analyzed period. Among the selected potential factors which are known to impact the nrrmber of fatahties are the industry production and the unemployment rate. Also, the influences weather and road safety measirres (or countermeasures) are accoimted for when the possible interventions of the model are analyzed (factors or specific events which impact the road safety level). 

Figure 4.2. Number of fatalities (Fat), unemployment rate (Un) and industrial production index (Ind) in Poland in the period 199 2012. For a color version of the figure, see www.iste.co.uk/jacob/safety.zip...

The results confirm that a structural time series model with explanatory and intervention variables is an appropriate tool for explaining the changes in the monthly number of fatalities in Poland for the period 1998-2012, in relation to economic factors such as the industrial production index and/or the unemployment rate. A prehminary graphical analysis was conducted, which confirmed that the correlation between the munber of fatalities and the industrial production index (and the imemployment rate respectively) was positive (and negative respectively) on average. Log-log and log-lin specifications were then tested for accounting for these correlations, and three models which confirm this average relation were finally retained as statistically satisfactory and interpretable. 

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