Page 8 - IDEA Study 4 2017 Public financing for pre-school places

the private gains for families, both financial and non-monetary, pre-school facilities prove
to be a public service with a net benefit for society. In this respect, the shortage of places
in pre-school facilities during the last 10 to 15 years seems like a huge wasted opportunity.
This shortage, both past and present, is the consequence of poor management in this
segment of the public agenda, and political preferences.

Calculation of Impact on Public Budgets

This chapter describes the method used to estimate the impact of placing one additional
child into a pre-school facility on public budgets. We have taken only the immediate
and direct impact into account. Long-term, secondary impact will be discussed
in the following chapter. Table 1 shows the basic categories of costs and benefits included
in the analysis.
Immediate costs of one additional place in a pre-school facility include additional public
expenditures for the pre-school’s operation, both on the government and municipal level.
Benefits include the increase in tax revenue, social security and health insurance
contributions, and decrease in expenditures due to a reduction in welfare benefits, since
parents who would have been receiving these benefits can now seek employment and
increase their family income. In the following chapters, the word “parents” has often been
replaced by “women” or “mothers”, since in reality, the possible increase in employment
applies to women/mothers far more often than to men/fathers. In this respect, it is worth
mentioning that the drop in employment due to motherhood (of pre-school children) in
the Czech Republic is the highest in the European Union (–35 p.p.), compared to a
slightly positive increase for men (+10 p.p.)7

7http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/pdf/themes/31_labour_market_participation_of_women.pdf, p. 2.

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