Barbara Liberda

Determinants of Saving in Poland: Are They Different from Those in Other OECD Countries?

This paper studies the drivers of total private and household saving in Poland and compares them to those in developed countries. To this end, two types of saving regressions are estimated: one based on an annual panel of OECD countries, and the other using Polish quarterly time series. Compared to a typical OECD country, Polish private and household saving rates are more affected by the process of financial deepening. They are also more sensitive to changes in government and corporate saving.

Determinates of Savings and Economic Growth in Poland in Comparison to the OECD Countries

Authors investigate interactions between the rate of economic growth and the saving rate in Poland in the 1990s. Tendencies observed in the Polish economy are related to the long term trends of growth and saving in a number of OECD countries. A simulation of possible development paths of the Polish economy is conducted using results of the estimation of the saving function for the OECD countries in the period 1971-1994. The model implies that, if the factors determining the rate of saving and the rate of growth were the same as those in the OECD countries during the last 25 years, the rate of saving in Poland would be higher by 5 percentage points and would equal 22 percent. Moreover, assuming the medium term rate of growth of 5-7 percent, a reduction of the budget deficit and the current account deficit, would result in a rise in the saving rate up to the level of 25-27 percent of GDP. Savings of households would rise by 2-3 percentage points to the level of 12 percent of GDP. The long term rate of growth would either be lowered down to 4 percent or raised up to 8 percent depending on the extent of utilisation of externalities and increasing returns from the employment of the human capital and technological change.

Age-productivity patterns in talent occupations for men and women: a decomposition

One could expect that in the so-called talent occupations, while access to these professions may differ between men and women, the gender wage gap should actually be smaller owing to the high relevance of human capital quality. Wage regressions typically suggest an inverted U-shaped age–productivity pattern. However, such analyses confuse age, cohort and year effects. Deaton decomposition allows us to disentangle these effects. We apply this method to investigate the age–productivity pattern for the so-called ‘talent’ occupations. Using data from a transition economy (Poland) we find that talent occupations indeed have a steeper age–productivity pattern. However, gender differences are larger for talent occupations than for general occupations.

Does a Change of Occupation Lead to Higher Earnings

The aim of this paper is to identify how the mobility between different types of broadly defined occupation (hired work, self-employment in industry, services and agriculture or social security beneficiaries) changes personal income of individuals. We apply the Markov matrices to the panel data on 30540 individuals for 2007-2008 from the Polish Household Budget Surveys. Our hypothesis is that a change of occupation affects individual capability to earn income, controlling for the occupation a person quits and the occupation a person starts, as well as age, education level and a permanent or temporary character of work. We test our hypothesis using the regression analysis. Our results show that the inter-occupational mobility matters mostly for those quitting hired work for self-employment, for the better educated, as well as for respondents above 60 years of age.