An Analysis of Housing Policy Measures Aimed at Supporting Labour Flexibility in the Czech Republic

The analyses aimed at studying the micro-level of relationships between the labour market and the housing market in the Czech Republic using secondary data

The analyses aimed at studying the micro-level of relationships between the labour market and the housing market in the Czech Republic, first using secondary data sets from sociological research conducted outside this project, confirmed that a person's intention to move for employment (i.e. not real migration, but potential migration in the future, if something, most likely unemployment, were to occur) is significantly affected by age, education, marital status, size of the locality they live in, and sex of the respondent. The highest completed level of education generally did not have a linear effect. Thus, in the case of unemployment, those more significantly willing to re-locate for employment are men, younger people, and single or divorced people from larger towns; also, people with elementary education (usually regardless of the job offered) and, according to some surveys, people with university education (usually with an accent on work in their field) are also more likely to move for employment. The effect of the highest completed level of education on the intention to migrate for employment is clearly at odds with the effect on real migration for employment observed in the ČSÚ data. This may be owing to the methodology used (labour migration among people with elementary education may not be accompanied by a reported change in permanent residence) or owing to the way respondents with elementary education stylise their responses. It is necessary to point out that respondents were asked to react to a situation that was not actually real, and their reactions, if such a situation were ultimately to occur, could ultimately differ (the inconsistency of responses was also reflected in the high variability of simple frequencies, that is, variability in the percentage of economically active people who, according to various surveys, using different sample methods and using questions that were formulated differently and presented in a different order, were willing to move to obtain work if they became unemployed). Understandably it is impossible to distinguish the effect of methodology and stylisation on this.

Using data from the "Housing Attitudes 2001" survey it was possible to test the effect of circumstances relating to housing, particularly the effect of tenure, on the intention to migrate for employment. An analysis of the data revealed the statistical significance of the effect of tenure (and thus also the significance of the type of rent paid) on the intention to move for employment if a person becomes unemployed, even while controlling for the effect of other selected factors observed in the research. This means that, according to the results of the regression model analysing the effect of all the factors found to have a statistically significant effect on the intention to move for employment together, people living in temporary forms of accommodation, and people living in private or municipal rental flats are significantly more willing to move for work (reasons) if they were to become unemployed; conversely, people who own or co-own a family home are significantly less willing to do so. This conclusion was reached using a relatively weak statistical model - the level of explained variation of the dependent variable was low (a maximum of 21% in the logistic regression), which means that many important factors are left out of the model (as they could not be ascertained in the surveys). The increase in the explained variation thus became one of the main objectives in the supplemental surveys conducted specially within the framework of this project.