Abstract
Research background: Social services are the main social tool used for the prevention and solution of social exclusion and its risk. Services of social prevention are focused on the well-being of the whole society and they prevent it from the influence of a wide range of socio-economic phenomena related to social exclusion, understood in multidimensional terms.
 Purpose of the article: The purpose of the paper is to evaluate districts of the Czech Republic with respect to selected socio-economic factors that lead or can lead to social exclusion, when the emphasis is placed on the exclusion of children and youth, and to identify the causes of differences existing among these districts within the period of years 2011?2016.
 Methods: The paper focuses on multi-criterial assessment of districts of the Czech Republic using 23 indicators covering main aspects of social exclusion, which are processed with the Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS technique) in combination with the Coefficient of Variance method used to determine the indicators? weight. The results obtained using these methods are completed by the Moran?s index, Shapiro-Wilk test, Mann-Whitney test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Kendall Rank Coefficient and Levene?s test.
 Findings & value added: A small number of districts with very negative assessment, with the presence of social exclusion and its higher risk, respectively, are identified. Differences among regions are constant and could not be assigned to randomness or disposable changes in the structure of indicators. Higher number of children born to unmarried mothers can be considered a typical aspect of the districts with higher risk of the social exclusion. The methods applied in the research, whose results and findings are presented in the paper, can be inspiring to further studies focusing on the social exclusion in its multidimensionality. The research is framed with the European Union discourse of social exclusion, thus the presented findings also open space for the comparisons and discussions of the factors associated with the social exclusion in other European Union Member States.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, social inclusion, elimination of the social exclusion and its risk, respectively, have been a key priority for the European Union (EU) and for its Member States
With respect to the absolute values of the assessment results that are obtained using the Coefficient of Variance method (CV)-TOPSIS, we find out negative skewness, existence of graphically identified outliers and balanced rate of variability vci∈
We evaluated the socio-economic situation in the Czech Republic using the CV-TOPSIS technique, when we considered 23 indicators covering various socio-economic problems related to social exclusion and its risk, and we placed the emphasis on social exclusion of children and youth
Summary
Since the 1990s, social inclusion, elimination of the social exclusion and its risk, respectively, have been a key priority for the European Union (EU) and for its Member States. In the year 2019, 1.306 million individuals, it means 12.5% of Czech population, lived at risk of poverty or social exclusion It was the lowest percentage rate among all 28 EU Member States and this rate meant fulfilment of the national targets concerning reduction of the risks of both social events. Despite this optimistic result, social exclusion remains a challenge for the Czech policy-makers, because the number of people living in the conditions of income poverty has oscillated since the year 2008 around 1 million, which means in relative terms around 9–10% of the whole population. If low or insufficient incomes are seen as the most important cause of social exclusion, it is evident that the primary cause of social exclusion has not been eliminated in the Czech society
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