EdPlaCo-MK: A tool for greater gender wage equality in Macedonia

The project aims to develop an online tool and raise awareness for greater fairness in pay between men and women in Macedonia.

Short-term goals:

  • To build an online platform EdPlaCo-MK, to which every individual and institution can, based on their characteristics, evaluate its own salary/ies;
  • To popularize EdPlaCo-MK among firms and public institutions in Macedonia, as a “label” whose acquisition will mark them as fair pay employers;
  • To design a manual for using EdPlaCo-MK and to disseminate it to the present and future employees, which would increase its popularity at the individual level;
  • To lobby for embedding licensing in EdPlaCo-MK in government institutions (mainly within the Strategy for gender equality).

 

Donor: United Nations Development Program

Duration: 2014 (6 months)

 

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EdPlaKo-MK web tool

Video – The gender wage gap in Macedonia through the perspectives of 5 women

 

Analysis of gender wage gap when women are highly inactive: Evidence from repeated imputations with Macedonian data

The objective of this research is to investigate if gender employment gap can shed some light on the gender wage gap and to develop a web-based developmental tool to tackle gender wage inequality in Macedonia.

Macedonian labor market is characterized by relatively large gender employment inequality, coupled with considerable gender pay inequality. These inequalities are magnified at lower education levels. The objective of this research is to investigate if gender employment gap can shed some light on the gender wage gap. In particular, low-to-medium skilled women in Macedonia may be affecting the gender wage gap due to their labor inactivity owing to child-raising, being unpaid family worker, high reservation wage and remittance receiving from the male migrant. We propose to explore this view by estimating selection-corrected and adjusted-for-characteristics gender wage gaps for different skill levels in Macedonia. The empirical approach will recuperate the counterfactual wage distribution that would prevail had the selection into work been fully random. As an innovative approach to this issue, we will use alternative imputation techniques which do not require assumptions on the actual level of missing wages, as typically required in the matching approach, nor they require arbitrary exclusion restrictions raised in two-stage Heckman sample-selection models. At the policy level, the issue gained importance and the government responded with establishing Equal Opportunities Committees both at national and local level, but the problem of gender (wage and employment) discrimination has not been resolved. Our investigation may shed new light on the issue and help in i) devising fuller Strategy for equal employment opportunities; and, more importantly, ii) establishing the EdPlaCo-MK as a web-tool serving as a standard helping employers (public and private) to develop best practice for fair employment and compensation.

 

Provider: Global Development Network and the Government of Japan

Duration: 2013-2015 (two years)

 

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Article in the Journal of Labor Research

Video – The gender wage gap in Macedonia through the perspectives of 5 women

 

Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia

This project aims to explore if remittances may be used to support the entrepreneurial activities of unemployed youth in households receiving remittances, in an environment of global economic crisis, tightened credit conditions, lack of venture capital financing and the malfunctioning labor market.

Low job creation and high unemployment are the most important problems of Macedonia. The youth unemployment rate of 55% remains persistently high. On the other hand, Macedonia receives remittances of outward migration in the amount of above 20% of GDP annually. Their usage, however, remains largely unknown. This proposed research aims to explore if remittances may be used to support the entrepreneurial activities of unemployed youth in households receiving remittances, in an environment of global economic crisis, tightened credit conditions, lack of venture capital financing and the malfunctioning labor market. We will use the Remittances Survey conducted in September/October 2012 to explore the probability that a young person will enter self-employment if his/her household receives remittance. We propose two techniques: i) propensity score matching, so as to find similar, in characteristics, non-receiving households, as those receiving remittance; and ii) instrumental variables approach, so as to account for the potential endogeneity of remittances with respect to the decision to establish own firm. We expect that our findings would enable us to propose policy recommendations in the fiscal, social, and labor-market sphere, aimed at channeling the large amount of remittances in Macedonia into generating jobs for youth.

 

Provider: International Development Research Center

Duration: 2013-2014 (1 year)

 

Project’s web site

 

Empirical analysis of the risks and resilience to shocks of the Macedonian insurance sector

The objective of this research is to analyse the risks to the stability of the Macedonian insurance sector and to quantify its resilience to shocks.

 We create an empirical economic model to identify which variables potentially affect the stability of insurance sector, as measured through the solvency margin. We use the results of the economic model to develop a stress test model of the Macedonian insurance sector, where by assigning shocks to the statistically significant variables, we will assess the resilience of the insurance sector to shocks. We create one baseline scenario without shocks and four shocked scenarios to examine the resilience of the insurance sector and of the individual insurance companies to shocks. The latter is done through the Value at Risk (VaR) statistics obtained by a Monte Carlo simulation.

 

Provider: The Geneva Association for the Study of Insurance Economics

Period: 2013 (12 months)

 

Paper winning the ISA prize (MK) – Info on ISA prize

Paper published in Geneva papers on risk and insurance – issues and practice