UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS COST TO PUBLIC BUDGETS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC IN 2010 – 2015

Within the EU, the Czech Republic belongs to the countries with unemployment below average. Therefore, it may seem that unemployment benefits and other direct costs connected with unemployment constitute a rather small expenditure. In our paper we show that this first impression is false. This paper comprehensively assesses the impact of unemployment on the public budgets. Its contributions are as follows: (1) we discuss the methodological problems that are associated with particular methods of the impact calculation, and (2) we quantify the impacts for the Czech Republic budgets in the years 2010 – 2015 and compare them with other studies. Our results suggest that in 2015 the annual costs of unemployment reached EUR 9.064 per unemployed person. According to other studies, the nominal value of the costs is slightly higher than is the case in Slovakia (as a similar economy) and lower than the results for traditional European countries. The results are also lower when the costs are compared to average labour costs in the economy.