The reunification of West Germany and East Germany occurred in 1990 and had a great impact on the country. This essay investigates the impact that reunification had on the poverty structure of West Germany on the long-run. The results indicate that reunification had a negative impact on poverty since it increased the poverty rate by 4.88 percentage point in 2000 and by 6.16 percentage point in 2005. The structure of the poor population slightly changed the year following the reunification. Five years later, the structure of the poor population was similar to what it was before the reunification. However, during this period, the income transfer became more efficient since it decreased poverty by 6 percentage point to 16 percentage point more after reunification than it used to do before.

The thesis on the topic "Multi-criteria evaluation of living standards of households, indices of material deprivation" compares two approaches to the measurement of poverty and social exclusion. The first is an absolute concept, which is based on the measurement of the material deprivation. The second is a relative concept, which is currently in the European Union represented by the indicator "at-risk-of-poverty rate". Before being applied on the real data from 2008 for the Czech Republic, both concepts are theoretically described and explained. The indicator "at-risk-of-poverty rate" is calculated based on the results of a survey on the income and the living conditions of the Czech population. The material deprivation is then analysed for different groups of people of the Czech population and the indices of material deprivation are calculated. In the final section, the European Union member countries are compared according to these two concepts.

This master thesis aims to find out the socio-economic factors, which most affect the level of income inequality in society. The aim is to quantify the contribution of each social groups to the overall income defferentiation by decomposition of some income inequality indicators. The thesis is focused on a group of people based on their social status in society and their level of education, and so it is determined in relation the social background and income level. Income distribution strongly affects the value of risk-of poverty, and therefore this thesis put emphasis on the relationship between income inequality and poverty rate of each group. Development of various indicators measuring income inequality provides a comprehensive overview of the situation of income differentiation in the Czech Republic and also indicates the trend for income distribution in the last period.

The dissertation deals with the issue of poverty in the Czech Republic, especially with its economic, political and historical context of development, theory and practice of its measurement and possible international comparability, both in scale and in terms of the effectiveness of social transfers system. The effectiveness is understood as reducing the extent of poverty represented by the at-risk-of-poverty rate used e.g. in Europe 2020 Strategy. The aim of the dissertation is to analyze the problem of income poverty and its development in the Czech Republic with a special focus on the effectiveness of the social transfers system in relation to reducing the extent of income poverty. The effectiveness is analyzed separately in case of social transfers as a whole, and in case of social transfers excluding old-age and survivors' pensions. The emphasis has been placed on international comparisons and on the poorest layers of the population represented by the study of the lower poverty lines than the standard one. Based on empirical analysis of survey data from the EU-SILC, it was disproved that the effectiveness of the Czech social transfers system was above average compared to the countries of the same welfare state model, the CEE region and the EU during the years 2005-2013. The Czech pension system plays a crucial role in the level of effectiveness of the social transfers system. The good position of the Czech Republic among the all three studied groups of countries in terms of effectiveness is maintained mainly thanks to its pension system.The current low level of poverty rate was achieved mainly thanks to the pre-crisis measures, respectively due to the specific timing of these measures package. The contribution of this dissertation consists in complex and systematized view of the income poverty in the Czech Republic, accompanied by the analysis of the effectiveness of the social transfer system. This analysis, owing to the time series (2005-2013), applied methods (methods of the European Commission vs. IZA method) and scope of the international comparison (welfare state model, CEE region and EU), has no similarity in the Czech scientific literature so far.