How effective and efficient is the public support granted to social enterprises?

Social entrepreneurship accounts for an important share of employment in the European labour market.Social enterprises, however, are mainly funded by public budgets. Based on the data of 307 individuals who received EU-funded support and a control group of the same size, we estimated the effect that this support had on the employability. To perform this task, we used a propensity score matching approach. We found a positive effect of 7.8% increase in the likelihood in employment of supported group. Women benefited with an estimated 11.6% increase, and people older than 40 years of age with an estimated 14.7% increase in employment. The timespan needed for the payback time is more than 13 years

Counterfactual impact evaluation of human resources development

The methods of Counterfactual Impact Evaluation (CIE) have not been extensively applied in the case of the Structural Funds assistance in the EU. The main research question is whether the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation methods are applicable in the case of OP HRE (Operational program Human Resources and Employment), area of support 1.1 in the Czech Republic and what requirements have to be met. In case of this intervention, the “treatment” investigated by this paper is the enterprise support to training of employees.The crucial part of conducting Counterfactual Impact Evaluations is the quality of data set. The OP HRE was tested for the compliance with the data requirements (sample size, randomization for approval of the assistance, homogeneity of the assistance). The area of support 1.1 in the OP HRE met the basic requirement for the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation. There is enough assisted firms and the assistance is homogenous (i.e. there are trainings in just a few type of educational themes). The OP HRE support 1.1 offers possibility for the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation

Political Values of Local Politicians Representing Non - Profit Organisations in Central Europe

Local politicians in Central Europe are actively participating in civil society organizations (NGOs). The socialization of politicians into different roles would affect their political preferences and, therefore, policy outcomes. Thus, we study whether the political values of NGO leaders are aligned differently from those of political party peers who are not engaged in NGOs. We draw our analysis on survey data of 355 local candidates from three large cities: Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest. We analyse the political preferences of local political leaders in the context of the official political preferences of their parties. We also compare the perceptions of elected politicians with those of non-elected politicians, and subsequently analyse the effect of engagement in civil society activity. The results suggest that the local politicians are oriented towards local community values and are less likely to account for the official positions of their political parties. The only factor relating to a candidate's likelihood of election is the presence of a candidate’s party in the national parliament

Do voluntary civic engagement and non-profit leadership challenge local political leadership in urban development?

EU policies support a place-based approach with the increasing role of local partners in political decision-making. The current crisis of formal political leadership raises the question of whether or not formal leadership is becoming dispersed and informal place leadership can succeed in filling the vacuum. Based on data from the implementation of 58 EU-funded Integrated Urban Development Plans in Czechia, we found that informal leadership is challenging formal local political leadership. Nevertheless, its success has been limited in obtaining political legitimacy due to missing dialogue between the local movements and nonprofit leaders when searching for solutions to local problems

Successes & Failures in EU Cohesion Policy: An Introduction to EU cohesion policy in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe

The book offers though-provoking insights on the performance and effectiveness of EU cohesion policy in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe by highlighting the key achievement and identifying the main shortcomings. One of the most important advantages of the book is that it covers many distinct actions of this policy, the authors also, based on wide-ranging analysis, formulate policy recommendations for the future

Non-profit organizations’ participation in the management of public programmes: The case of the Czech Republic

EU Cohesion Policy requires the interaction of public, private and non-profit sectors in policy making. The case of the Czech Republic enables us to identify the major obstacles to the successful implementation of this approach as the Czech population perceives the ability of NGOs to influence policies at the lowest level among all the EU member states. The goal of the study is to identify and explain the determinants of success and failure regarding NGOs’ participation in designing public programmes. The methodology includes a combination of in-depth interviews with NGOs ́' representatives and public servants, a review of official documents, a focus group, and a stakeholders’ review of the study’s conclusions. The main obstacles to the implementation of the partnership principle are the following: insufficient capacities among NGOs; fluctuations in participating public servants and NGO representatives; dependence of partnership on personal contacts; late start and nonconsultative, informative character of partnership

Creating social innovation in urban development through collaborative processes

Uncertainty is a major factor in urban development as a consequence of a changing society. Major theoretical approaches to urban development, such as place-based leadership or coproduction, emphasize the importance of the public sector. This study aims to enhance the understanding of urban development processes as a collaborative and participatory concept through social innovation. We apply the concept of socially creative milieus to analyze the emergence of social innovation under the constraint of uncertainty. The criteria 'agents of innovation', 'adopters', 'diffusion channels', 'constraints', 'inertia', and 'impacts' are analyzed using a holistic case study in the field of urban development. Our results show that the presence of high social capital supersedes the coercive power of the public sector. By applying the creative milieus approach, environments like the density of networks and contacts in the governance of urban places make innovative development possible

The Impacts of Subsidies on Czech Firms

In the Czech Republic there has been invested a lot of money to the human capital through the European Social Fund. The Human Resources and Employment Operational Programme plays an important role by providing subsidies for the training of employees and an introduction of modern forms of management and human resource development. This paper summarizes the application of the regression discontinuity method to test whether there is an impact of EU assistance on employment in supported firms in 2009. The estimations were conducted with a sample with 1 176 supported and 87 rejected applicants. The estimation results suggest that the impacts of the intervention on employment is positive and statistically significant. The employment change in supported firms was on average about 10–15 p.p. higher than in unsupported firms