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Perception of tax evasion by individual citizens is of considerable interest to politicians, since people’s perceived attitudes affect the approach to tax compliance throughout the society. It is thus worth identifying personal characteristics that are related to a higher degree of tolerance and justification for tax evasion. Based on the 2008 European Values Survey data and using descriptive statistics, the paper discusses the relationship between the respondents’ characteristics and their tendency to justify tax evasion. The study finds a strong relationship between this tendency and age, educational attainment and economic activity, the two other variables (parenthood and income) indicating only a weak relationship. Moreover, the current issue allows us to convincingly argue against the regression analysis stereotypes which often yield biased and confl icting results. The paper confirms our constructive criticism, thus opening up space for an extended discussion of a more balanced use of both descriptive statistics and regression models.
The goal of the paper is to analyze the demographic discrepancies in the relationship between customers’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their loyalty towards mobile telecommunication companies, within the particular socio-cultural and economic context of one of the largest national markets of Central and Eastern Europe. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among a sample of 1,464 mobile telecommunication customers from the urban areas of Romania. The findings emphasize several significant dissimilarities between gender, age, education and residence type based consumer categories in what concerns the impact of various CSR dimensions, as perceived by customers, on corporate brand loyalty. The results have practical implications for enhancing corporate brand loyalty in the regional mobile telecommunication market by outlining those CSR policies which should have priority in implementation and, especially, communication.
1 12 Razin, A., Sadka, E. (2005): The Decline of the Welfare State: Political Economics of Ageing, Migration, and Globalization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
47.2% are men. The average age of the respondents is M age = 49.2 years, the age range is 18–89 years with a standard deviation of 16.8 years. Among the age categories, in order to distinguish two important target groups of the
In this study, we challenge the problem of inadequate voluntary pension savings by exploring the micro-dataset of the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) for three countries: Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. The existing empirical literature usually focuses on the role of socio-demographic factors to understand this phenomenon, and theoretical studies additionally highlight the role of behavioural factors. However, empirical studies in this field are extremely scarce. The use of the LWS data enables us to fill this research gap. Separately for each country, we verify the role of individuals' risk attitudes and intertemporal choices in the demand for voluntary pension savings. To make the results more robust, we add a set of socio-demographic control variables to our regressions. Our findings clearly reveal that being more risk averse and being less forward looking negatively affect people's propensity to save for retirement. Furthermore, we confirm that age, gender and education are significant predictors of pension demand in each of the analysed countries. We argue that these conclusions have practical meaning to improve regulatory frameworks.
Based on a micro-level approach and using data from the European Working Conditions Survey, covering 27 countries, we analyse the determinants of job quality. With cluster analysis applied to 11 dimensional indices, we form three homogeneous country groups and identify, by estimating twice-censored Tobit models, the main determinant factors affecting the individual level of job quality in each group. We verify the relevance of variables related to worker characteristics, firm characteristics, and the country in which the individual works. Among worker characteristics, education and employment status are the factors with the highest impact on job quality, while the economic sector is the most important firm characteristic. The results suggest the existence of important differences among groups regarding the magnitude of the impact of some factors. The highest dissimilarities are found between the group with better jobs (Nordic countries plus Belgium) and the group with lower quality jobs (Central and Eastern European countries plus Portugal and Greece). Variables related to age, education, dimension of the firm, and economic sector are those in which more heterogeneity is found among the groups.
At the end of 2014, more than 23% of the foreign currency denominated mortgage portfolio in Hungary was overdue; about 20% was classified as non-performing and the tendency is worsening. In this paper, we propose a solution to effectively reduce the credit and systemic risk inherent to this portfolio – the proposed model can be applied to other mortgage portfolios in trouble as well. The main element of our proposal is income-contingent repayment complemented with effective incentives to motivate debtors to repay their debt. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is attractive for both the debtors and the lenders; therefore, contrary to some recent policy measures, in this case there is no need for direct state intervention to force modifications to the existing legal contracts. In order to evaluate the possible effects, we simulated a realistic population of borrowers with different age, debt, loan-to-value, and income. Then we calculated the expected income paths, the repayments of the borrowers as well as the profit of the lenders on the basis of the non-performing FX mortgage portfolio. The results underpin that the proposed scheme creates significant value added and, most importantly, that it can effectively reduce the vulnerability of the entire economy to future shocks.
The task of economics is apparently changing. After confronting the limits to growth, the economic interests, methods and thoughts, even its use of words and concepts are slowly but persistently modified. The discussion of “equilibrium” is replaced by the concern for a “sustainable path”. Instead of finding out how to produce “more” it looks for “better”, “cheaper” and “recyclable” commodities. Labor saving serves by and large the reduction of the working week and transformation of the life-cycle instead of surplus-production. The markets of developed countries are more easily glutted and their recessions deeper. The ever louder and more aggressive marketing attests to all this. It is high time to renew our old ways, to revisit the aged analytical and forecasting models. The renovation of obsolete concepts is rendered necessary to facilitate the introduction of an orderly and planned future of prudence. This investigation focuses less on the seldom, perhaps never occupied point of equilibrium, rather on the behavior and motion of the economic systems in its vicinity.
A modified version of the popular Lee-Carter method (Lee-Carter 1992) is applied to forecast mortality rates in Hungary for the period 2004–2040 on the basis of mortality data between 1949 and 2003 both for men and women. Another case is also considered based on a restricted data set corresponding to the period 1989–2003. The model fitted to the data of the period 1949–2003 forecasts increasing mortality rates for men between ages 45 and 55, pointing out that the Lee-Carter method is hardly applicable for countries where mortality rates exhibit trends as peculiar as in Hungary. However, models fitted to the data for the last 15 years both for men and women forecast decreasing trends similarly to the case of countries where the method was successfully applied. Hence one gets a better fit in this way, however, further concerns suggest that the Lee-Carter model, which is celebrated and widely used in actuarial practice, does not necessarily give sufficiently good prediction.
In this paper we aim to investigate what role fiscal cycles played in the development of the Hungarian state budget balances since the change of regime in 1989 until the parliamentary elections held in 2010. The literature has found that political budget cycles (PBC) are more typical in less developed countries with a shorter period of experience with democratic institutions, like the post-socialist transition economies. Nevertheless, empirical studies point out that this phenomenon has been disappearing over time. By testing the six parliamentary elections in Hungary until 2010, we show that discretional governmental actions of pork barrel spending were apparent more or less in almost each election period, peaking in the last decade. The most typical form of the fiscal cycles in Hungary proved to be social transfers to households including old-age benefits, family support or price subsidies, but also public sector wages were subject to PBC. As a result, state budget balances were significantly shaped by the cyclical movements of fiscal laxity and restrictions, resulting in strong fluctuations in fiscal balances and an overall high budget deficits in the two decades under review.
