Page 5 - IDEA Studie 3 2016 Verejna podpora mist ve skolkach

Study 3 /2016
Public financing for pre-school places pays off:
a cost and benefit analysis2 MARCH 2016
KLÁRA KALÍŠKOVÁ, DANIEL MÜNICH, FILIP PERTOLD
Summary
 Countrywide statistics suggest that the long-term shortage of places in state pre- school institutions (kindergartens) has become gradually less severe over the past few years thanks to population decline, and that in future there will be sufficient places available at pre-schools. Nevertheless at a local level demand is still far outstripping supply in many places, and this is unlikely to change as internal migration and other demographic changes continue.
 Our analysis of financial costs and benefits reveals that the shortage of places in pre- schools in the past decade has led to an undeniable net loss for the public budget. Our analysis demonstrates that the net gain to the public budget from every additional place in pre-school is on average 10,000 crowns per year. Public financial support for pre-schools would not result in a loss even under very conservative estimates. On the contrary, the net gains are in fact far higher if the indirect and long-term consequences of supporting further places in pre-schools are taken into account.
 If we include families' private gains in the form of higher income, both as an immediate effect and into the future, the improvement of quality of life, young people's greater willingness to have children given the relative ease of combining
2 The authors wish to convey their sincere thanks to Aleš Chmelař for providing an initial basic version of the cost and benefit analysis, to Vladimír Hulík for verifying the entry data used from regional school statistics, and to both for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this study. All opinions, possible omissions and errors, and any incorrect assumptions or interpretations in this work are the authors' sole responsibility.
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