Authors: Marjan Petreski, Blagica Petreski
Policy study 2: Leading composite index produced by Finance Think: Forecasting power reassessed
Mind the gaps between the budget lines and the programs of the National strategy for poverty reduction
The project aims to increase the effectiveness and usage of poverty-reduction programs by increasing the transparency of the associated budget lines and informing the citizens about them.
Short-term goals:
- Identification and mapping of the weak links between the budget lines and the poverty-reduction programs;
- Increasing citizens’ awareness of the programs for poverty reduction they can be eligible for;
- Increasing the awareness of the civil and research sector of the effectiveness of poverty-reduction programs’ implementation (budget expenditure).
Provider: USAID and Foundation Open Society Macedonia
Duration: 2013-2014 (10 months)
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Response by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy
Booklet: Mind the gaps between the budget lines and the programs of the National Strategy for Poverty Reduction MKD version – ALB version
Thematic web site: www.siromastija.mk
Migration as social protection: Analysis of Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian remittance-receiving households
The objective of the research is to investigate if remittances sent to Macedonia, Albania and Serbia serve social protection for household members left behind.
In particular, we will analyse if and how remittances determine/influence social condition (stability or vulnerability) of the household, the latter being described through an index composition of the income level, employment status, nourishment, health and housing conditions. For the purpose of the study, we aim at defining social stability/vulnerability not in traditional terms – only as “dollar a day” – but rather in terms of household’s ability to meet their basic needs aside income: nutrition, health services, housing, leisure and the like. This touches upon Green’s (2014) recent note that “being poor and sick is very different from being poor and healthy” and defines social stability in this multidimensional framework.
The key tasks include:
- developing a literature overview linking remittances to social protection and social vulnerability;
- devising an indicator of social vulnerability;
- econometric investigation of the causal links between remittances and social vulnerability;
- deeper qualitative investigation through interviews of the linkages between and contexts of the two phenomena (remittances and social vulnerability);
- devising policy proposals;
- wide communication with the policymakers and the public.
Donor: Regional Research Promotion Program
Duration: 2 years (2014-2016)
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Project meeting, Rome 2-5 April 2015 – Agenda – Gallery
Media appearance – Ekonomski horizonti – RevolucionerMK
RRPP Annual conference presentation, Ohrid 28-29 May 2015 – Resources
Round table, 10 June 2015 – Invitation – Agenda – Gallery – Presentation
International Conference on Eurasian Economies, 9-11 September 2015, Kazan Russia – Presentation – Proceedings
Training & Project meeting, Amsterdam 16-20 March 2016 – Agenda – Gallery 1 2
Workshop “Migration and its Consequences for Albanian Households”, Elbasan, Albania, 8 September 2016 – Agenda
EBES International Conference, Vienna, Austria, 28-30 September 2016 – Picture
Economic forum, Skopje, 22 September 2016 – Agenda – Gallery
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Policy briefs – Macedonia – Albania – Serbia
International book “Migration as social protection”
Journal article in International Migration
Policy study 1: Mind the gap between the budget lines and the programs of the National strategy for poverty reduction
Authors: Blagica Petreski, Despina Petreska, Aleksandar Kostadinov
Simulation of a voucher policy for improving the social condition of individual remittance receivers in Macedonia
The purpose of the study is to develop a simulation of potential voucher system for social protection of individual members of the households receiving remittances in Macedonia.
Specific objectives:
– To conduct analysis for Macedonia at the individual level (using the DotM Remittance Survey 2008)
– To develop an econometric model;
– To simulate the effects of potential voucher for protection of socially vulnerable individual recipients of remittances by simulating the effects on the health indicator of the recipient.
Donor: Partnership for Economic Policies
Duration: 2014-2015 (1 year)
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Working paper
Policy conference – Invitation – Gallery
Journal paper
Economic Research Today for Better Policy Tomorrow
The оverall objective of this project is to build up the capacity of the Association for economic research, advocacy and policymaking “Finance Think” in supporting the economic policy decision makers to deliver credible policy decisions based on research findings and arguments based on quantification, as well in elevating the debate in the society about economic processes and reforms.
Provider: Think Tank Fund (Open Society Foundations)
Duration: 1 year (2014-2015)
Empowering women in Krushevo through mini clastering for sales and promotion of traditional products
Тhe objective of the project is to improve the living standards and social inclusion, and to reduce poverty in Krusevo, through association (mini-clustering) of women for production and sale of local, domestic, traditional and ecological, home-made products.
The short-term goals include:
Prompting social inclusion and interaction through association of individual producers, unemployed housewives;
Promoting awareness for investing in their skills to pull out of poverty and improve their lives;
Establishing system for production and promotion of local home-made products, in order to encourage and increase production, sales and promotion;
Strengthening the awareness among policy makers for the need of mini-clustering of individual producers of traditional food, as a tool to promote local economic growth and improve socio-economic conditions.
Donor: The Embassy of USA in Skopje
Duration: 2014-2015 (12 months)
Training for production, marketing and sales skills – Gallery 1 – Gallery 2 – Gallery 3
New Year Bazaar “Craft Art Fest” Participation – Gallery
Fair “It’s homemade, it’s from Krushevo…” – Gallery
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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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)