The aim of this article is to summarise the evolution of the labour market situation of vocational education graduates in the last 20 years in Poland. With the use of statistical analyses of LFS and PIAAC data, we present the main changes in the situation of vocational education graduates in terms of their number, employment status, wages and skills. The number of students has decreased sharply in the last 20 years, in basic vocational schools, but not in vocational upper secondary schools. Our results support the thesis that the main challenges facing vocational education in Poland are not the decline in the number of students, but the strong negative selection mechanisms, low effectiveness of attaining basic skills and the inability of vocational education to quickly adapt to structural changes in the economy. We show why the key success factor of vocational education should be the development of general skills, and why introducing a dual education system is unlikely to solve its most important problems in Poland.
It is interesting to compare maintenance costs of children between countries with similar yet different family policy regimes because this could yield valuable lessons for researchers and policy-makers and also for the sake of methodological development. In this study, we aim to conduct a comparative analysis of the equivalence scales in Austria, Italy, Poland and France taking into account the age of children. To this end, we use data from the European Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC) to calculate equivalence scales for mono-and duo-parental households for the first and second child. The four countries share common European cultural context, yet differ with respect to social environment, in particular to family policy. We apply the Engel estimation method proposing the share of housing spending in total expenditures as a tool to obtain commodity-specific equivalence scales. Our results are consistent with other studies showing that the cost of a first child is higher than that of a later child. The scale values are not the same across all the countries concerned, with the highest cost observed in Italy and the lowest in Poland.
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