The main objective of the project is to contribute to improvement of active labour market policies and boosting employment in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia.
More specific objectives of the policy advocacy are: (a) to identify legal, financial, and practical weakness in employment policies which result in their low efficiency and low effectiveness; (b) to inform and expand knowledge of key stakeholders in the field; (c) to empower stakeholders to make informed decisions by providing relevant analysis and feasible policy recommendations in this area; and (d) to put the issue of ALMP on the respective agendas of relevant decision-makers in these three countries.
Overall objective of the project is to increase the activation of persons at risk of social exclusion in the labor market by improving their skills, education, qualification and facilitating their full integration into the society and the labor market.
This overarching objective is broken down into specific purposes involving concrete interventions on three fronts:
Purpose 1: Improve the efficiency of employment and social services as a way of promoting the social inclusion of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups by assisting professionals from the Employment Centres and the Centres for Social Work in developing new skills as ‘Mentors for Social Inclusion’;
Purpose 2: Empower vulnerable and disadvantaged groups and give them the skills and experience required to breaking down the hurdles they encounter on their journeys into long-term work and independence through a pre-employment training program and work placements or internships in local businesses and social enterprises;
Purpose 3: Foster improvements in service delivery by designing new family support services, raising public awareness, and developing effective partnerships among key
stakeholders (local self-government units, governmental institutions, non-governmental organizations involved in service delivery, social partners, education and training providers) to produce results on the ground.
Donor: European Commission – Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance
Partner: Childcare and Family Center (KMOP) – Athens, Greece
The objective of this project is to correctly measure gender pay gaps (difference in wages between men and women) and motherhood pay gaps (difference in wages between mothers and childless women) in Macedonia and to advocate solutions for addressing the prevalent pay gaps.
In particular, previous research has demonstrated that Macedonia faces gender and motherhood wage gaps of 12.5% and 8.7%, respectively. However, a large part of females remains outside the labour market and can therefore not be considered when the pay gap is calculated (as their wage is not observed). This makes the above figures incorrect, since it is likely that females who stay outside the labour market are not randomly selected not to work. Hence, one bold challenge is to obtain knowledge for the proper calculation of pay gaps, i.e. econometric (technical) knowledge to address the selectivity bias in the labour market.
The project envisages activities positioned within three pillars:
Professional development thorough capacity building and direct knowledge transfer.
Collaborative research.
Building networks for advocacy, promotion and collaboration beyond the project cycle.
Donor: Know-how Exchange Program – Austria through the Central European Initiative
Project partner (know-how provider): The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies
Duration: November 2015 – January 2017
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Video – The gender wage gap in Macedonia through the perspectives of 5 women
Innovation persistence and firm growth models, Dario Guarashio, University of Rome Sapientsa, 19 September 2016
On the future of the European Monetary Union: Targeted reforms instead of greater fiscal integration” Ana Iara, European Commission, 20 September 2016
The space for an industrial policy in Europe, Mario Pianta, 22 September 2016
Modest recovery in the East – new uncertainty because of Brexit, the economic relations of Austria with the region and the long-term structural changes in the CESEE countries, Mario Holzner, 23 September 2016
Connectivity in Central Asia – International workshop, 15-16 December 2016.
Working meeting with a gender expert at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, 22 September 2016 – Gallery
Research stay, Vienna, 14-15 December 2016 – Agenda
The overall objective of the project is twofold: first, to improve the capacity of civil society and media to contribute to evidence-based economic dialogue in the country, enabling more participatory and transparent policymaking, with strong focus on fiscal policymaking; and, second, to increase the public awareness for the process of spending public money.
The objective of this project is to raise the awareness for the gender wage discrimination in Macedonia.
In particular, the project builds on an ongoing work, consisting of two pillars: i) calculating the gender wage gap in Macedonia, after workers’ characteristics and selectivity bias have been taken into consideration; and ii) building the EdPlaKo-MK web tool which enables individuals to test their gender-neutral wage and companies to test their wage system against gender discrimination. The main activity of this proposal consists of visualization of the gender wage gap in Macedonia that will be added to the EdPlaKo-MK site, as well through two flyers, so as it gives further information on gender wage gap at the level of sector, occupation, age, experience and education, and further promotes the EdPlaKo-MK tool.
The main objective of the project is to improve self-sustainability of women through development of alternative touristic attractions out of their skills for traditional, homemade and ecological production: embroider linen, knittings, wild berry jams, pasta peeling and grains, natural tea and the like.
Project activities envisage: training of Krushevo women for skills for entrepreneurship, promotion and sales of traditional products, expanding and strengthening the mini-cluster developed within the previous project, developing of three alternative touristic attractions embedding traditional values and promotional campaign involving an event “Days of alternative touristic attractions in Krushevo” and the Fair “It’s homemade, it’s from Krushevo…”. Designed in this way, the project offers an innovative way of combining social entrepreneurship and sustainable tourism, into an individual business model for women’s self-sufficiency.
Donor: US Embassy Skopje
Duration: 2015-2016 (10 months)
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Call for female participation October 2015 – Call – Application
Workshop for designing alternative touristic attractions, Krushevo, 25-26 December 2015 – Gallery
Piloting of “Botanic tour” and “Aronia grove”, Krushevo, 28 May 2016 – Gallery
Piloting of “Churches from Krushevo and a Vlach house – religion, arts, colors”, Krushevo, 05 June 2016 – Gallery
The main objective of the project is to increase the transparency and efficiency of the use of budget funds within municipalities.
Short-term goals include:
Increasing the awareness of citizens about the budget spending in the municipalities;
Raising the awareness of citizens about the effectiveness of the spending of the budgetary funds in their municipality, compared to other municipalities;
Identifying the purpose of the budget spending: development goals or current consumption.
The research covers the 15 largest, according to residents, municipalities in Macedonia.
Donor: Metamorphosis Foundation, in partnership with MCET and Reactor, within IPA Civil Society Facility.
The objective of the research is to estimate the contribution of the motherhood wage gap for the gender wage gap in Macedonia after considering workers’ characteristics and selectivity bias onto the labour market, for childbearing-age population.
In particular, we aim to disentangle to which extent the natural role of women to have and raise children potentially affects the gender wage gap. Recent study (Petreski et al. 2014) estimated the adjusted gender wage gap in Macedonia at 5.7%. However, motherhood may still explain some portion of this gap and the preliminary descriptive analyses suggest that it likely biases the gap upwards. This suggests that once motherhood wage gap has been considered, the unexplained adjusted gender wage gap in Macedonia (gender wage discrimination) may be even lower. The literature is abundant in analysing selectivity-corrected gender wage gaps and motherhood wage gaps separately, but merging the two literatures, and estimating these gaps together and at the same time correcting them for selectivity is rare. Hence, we propose a novel methodological approach to tacking this issue. Namely, we will estimate the gaps by employing a repeated imputation technique, which will impute the wages of those who are unemployed or inactive by making assumption on their position with respect to the median wage. Then the imputed samples will be compared to the base sample and the size of the selectivity bias obtained. The fairly standard Heckman estimates will be provided for comparison. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition will be then applied to the imputed sample to disentangle the explained and unexplained parts of the gender and motherhood wage gaps, giving a figure of the contribution of the latter in the former. Non-parametric alternatives to the decomposition will be pursued as robustness checks. The Survey of Income and Living Conditions (2010) will be used.
Provider: CERGE-EI and Global Development Network (RRC-15)
