This paper provides an international comparison of private returns to education which is put into the context of recent increase in tertiary education accessibility. We compare post-socialistic Central European countries: Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia to countries of continental Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Micro-data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions are utilised in order to estimate private returns to education using Mincerian earning regressions. We have found out that while in West European countries the returns to tertiary education acquired after 1995 are higher than returns to tertiary education acquired before 1995, which is in line with expectations based on obsolescence of education, this is not true for the post-socialistic countries. The Central European, post-socialistic countries provide evidence on decline in private returns to education acquired after 1995. This could be related with the character of tertiary education expansion, which was more intensive in post-socialistic countries and rather continuous in the countries of continental Western Europe.
The following article presents results of projecting the size of the economically active population in Slovakia until 2025 in three scenarios based on the anticipated age of retirement (62, 65, 70). Using individual data from the Labour Force Survey and a regional demographic forecast for Slovakia and applying the logit model we estimated the probability of economic activity for subgroups of the population. Assuming the retirement age at 62 we estimate the size of the economically active population in Slovakia to culminate in 2013 and decrease onwards rather sharply. Postponing the retirement age to 65 anticipates only a slowdown of the decreasing trend while postponing it to 70 would allow the number of the economically active population to culminate at higher levels earliest around 2020. The share of older age groups and individuals with university education should increase in line with expected trends.
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