Scholarly record

THE MOTIVES FOR PASSING PRIVATE NON-RETURNABLE FINANCIAL TRANSFERS TO FAMILY MEMBERS – EVIDENCE FROM POLAND

M. Solarz

Abstract

An important element of contemporary social and economic reality takes the form of intra- and intergenerational transfers. They are present both in the entire society scale (macro scale) and in individual families (micro scale). In the subject oriented perspective, among economic intra-family transfers the following types of transfers are identified: “gifts of time”, “gifts of space”, “financial and material transfers”. Financial transfers take two forms: inter vivos and post mortem. The first of them may have a returnable form (loans) or a non-returnable one (financial gifts). The latter has become the subject of discussion in the article. According to the results of the “Social Diagnosis 2015 – Conditions and life quality of Poles”, taking advantage of family financial help is the basic source of support for 34,2% of households in the situations when their regular income does not allow meeting their current needs. It seems interesting to analyse the motives followed by people when giving money to their family members. Providing the answer to such a research question is the primary goal of the presented article. The applied research methods are: critical analysis of the subject literature, statistical methods and a diagnostic survey. In April 2018, the author of the study carried out, in cooperation with the Market and Opinion Research Agency SW Research, using CAWI method (Computer Assisted Web Interview), own research on a representative sample of 830 Poles. The respondents were asked to indicate the maximum of 3 motives they followed when giving financial support to their family members within the recent 6 months. The conducted research showed that the majority of surveyed Poles expressed their readiness to offer financial support or actually provided it to their family members being in need of such help. Only 7,4% of the surveyed population declared that they refuse/avoid giving money. Among the reasons listed by the donors were the following ones: unreciprocated altruism (43,9% of responses), the sense of duty towards family members (32,3%), empathy (31,4%), gratitude (23,3%), reciprocated altruism (20,8%) and selfishness (12,6%). It has been positively evaluated that there are plenty of people willing to provide financial support to their family, which facilitates managing household finances. Private financial transfers represent an important instrument for creating financial resilience of households, which increases their ability to survive financial crises, resulting from unexpected events generating short term financial needs.

Publication details

Back to publication list