Comparing the approaches to quantify the monetary value of volunteering - the case of the Czech Republic

• In Event: Measurement tools development and assessment

Abstract

Within the last decades, there have been efforts to measure internationally comparable data on volunteering (Dingle et al., 2001; Salamon et al., 2011; ILO, 2021; ILO, 2021). One of the indicators of the scale and scope of volunteering is the value of volunteer time. This is connected with the topic of the economic value of volunteering, a dynamically growing subfield of economics that has generated numerous studies in various settings within the last fifty years (see Wolozin, 1975; Brown, 1999; Mook et al., 2007; Bowman, 2009; Salamon et al., 2011; Mayer & Silva, 2017; Orlowski & Wicker, 2019; Dostál, 2020), and others. Among other approaches, there is an ILO (2021) approach of quantifying the monetary value of volunteering, more specifically, the value of volunteer time. However, its methodology is still not universally accepted. One of the countries not following ILO recommendations is the Czech Republic, where the Czech Statistical Office (CSO) uses another method of quantification of the value of volunteer time, the median generalist wage (Rybáček et al., 2017). Both approaches, ILO and CSO, use observed market proxies for estimating the value of volunteer time. CSO approach uses one generalist median wage for all types of volunteering activities. The ILO (2021) approach looks for the closest market equivalent to the volunteering activity and uses the median specialist wage for this particular occupation.

This research compares these two approaches and applies them to the Czech data between the years 2011 and 2022, using the list of Examples of common volunteer work activities in Appendix III of the ILO manual (2021) for measuring volunteering. The data on replacement wages were obtained from the Czech Information System on Average Earnings (ISAE), which publishes national wage statistics separately for the private and public sectors. The results show that neither sector provides publishable data for all the examples of volunteering activities from the ILO (2021) manual. Thus, applying the more general specialist wages might be necessary in some cases. Also. in both sectors, public and private, the majority of specialist replacement wages in the Czech ISAE were either below or below the median generalist wage within the whole timeline. However, there were some exceptions, especially the replacement wages close to the median oscillating around the median value. Therefore, the Czech data implies that using the median generalist wage approach, like CSO, tends to overestimate some of the volunteer activities stated in the ILO manual while underestimating others. Also, these two groups of volunteer activities seem relatively stable. Though we do not know the scale of the particular types of volunteering regarding the number of hours, it is clear that there are significant differences among the replacement wages for various types of volunteering. Applying the specialist wage approach enables the national statistics to capture the possible changes within the structure of volunteering activities in the economy and society. The generalist wage approach is sensitive only to changes in volunteer hours, but it cannot capture the changing trends regarding volunteering activities.

References

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Author

• Jakub Dostal, College of Polytechnics Jihlava, Department of Economic Studies