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With Montenegro’s transition to a market-based, open and globalised economy, there is an explicit need for regular dialogue and partnership between education and the business sector. While the national policy papers and legal framework recognise this need and have already laid down the foundations of an enabling environment for it, the most feasible and beneficial modes for establishing intensive cooperation between the two remain to be found. The education and business partnership in Montenegro is a developing area, with a toolkit that is still ‘under construction’. The institutional landscape of education and business cooperation reveals a high level of involvement on the part of social partners in the consultation and decision-making mechanisms, as well as in the process of designing changes and innovations in the education system (new curricula, qualifications). This holds particularly true for [vocational education and training] VET, and to a much lesser extent for [higher education] HE. In spite of the lack of explicit incentives and of a tradition of cooperation, Montenegro has launched a wide range of topics and modes for education and business partnerships in the last decade. A great many of them have been inspired by [European Union] EU policy developments and EU Member States’ experiences, and have been backed with EU funds, and therefore represent pilot interventions rather than systemic measures. Yet the country has also demonstrated a capacity for critical assessment of imported patterns and for embarking on home-grown initiatives. The involvement of the civil society sector as a mediator in the dialogue between education and business is a remarkable finding of the current stocktaking exercise that not only resonates with the latest recommendations and guidelines at the EU level, but also brings hope with regard to the role of bottom-up innovations in this field in Montenegro. Finally, the report makes an assessment of the major challenges for education and business cooperation in VET and higher education, and formulates corresponding recommendations related to enhancing the capacities of education and business actors to engage in strategic partnerships while fine-tuning their modalities at both the governance and implementation levels.

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Dual apprenticeship training is a market-driven form of education at the upper secondary level, taking place in firms as well as in vocational schools. So far, little is known about the impact of the business cycle on the number of apprenticeship programs offered by firms. Using panel-data of Swiss cantons from 1988-2004, we find that the influence of the business cycle is statistically significant, but small in size. Instead, supply of apprenticeship programs is driven to a much greater extent by demographic change. Conversely, the number of first-year high school students is not affected by the business cycle. We find, however, that enrollment increases if the population at age 16 grows, but access to high schools does not become more restricted in times of negative growth.

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This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill-favouring shifts in the Russian and US economies are driven by the same set of factors. [The] analysis elaborates on the model of alternative theories of the increased wage skill premium and then evaluates three main hypotheses: skill-biased technological change, the market adjustment hypothesis, and the institutional factor hypothesis. To test these hypotheses, the study uses unique linked employer-employee data that spans the 16 years of the Soviet and transition periods in Russia (1985-2000), with a special emphasis on data quality, measurement errors, and retrospective biases. The main conclusion is that there is no uni-causal and time-invariant explanation for skill-biased changes in wages and employment in the Russian economy. The increased skill wage premium has been driven mainly by institutional factors during the early period and by productivity and technological change during the late transition period, and reinforced by market adjustment of wage ratio to the true differences in labour productivity.

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This report belongs to a series of country analyses developed by the European Training Foundation (ETF). It covers: Socioeconomic background; Key policy issues and strategies in human resource development (HRD); EU (European Union) and other donor policies and interventions; Mid-term perspective ETF intervention strategies; Human Resource Development Council (IPA 07-01); Education and Training 2010: NQF (National Qualifications Framework) development; Social inclusion; Entrepreneurship learning; Work Programme 2007: objectives and indicators. The ETF objective for Montenegro in 2007 is: Enhanced EU support for employment and HRD by way of partnership, capacity building and regional cooperation.

Apart from drawing on EU developments in vocational education and training (VET), Montenegro has not yet addressed the issue on how the wider education system, curriculum reforms, teacher training and the contribution of university-based research and development should be shaped to meet the demands of key areas of the economy and of an evolving knowledge and entrepreneurship society. These issues need to be addressed if Montenegro is to participate in mainstream EU developments and benefit from its own human capital potential. ETF assistance to Montenegro will support the EC (European Commission) and a range of Montenegrin partners in implementing labour market reforms consequent to economic transition, focusing particularly on employment concerns and education and training.

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The series of reports is indexed from TD/TNC 90.820 to TD/TNC 90.844. Show less

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesised that an employee’s education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labour market experience and increase with initially unobserved ability, since the employer gradually obtains better information on the productivity of an employee. Replicating US studies using data from a large German panel data set (GSOEP), we find no evidence for the employer learning hypothesis for Germany. Differentiating blue-collar and white-collar workers and estimating quantile regressions, however, leads to the conclusion that employer learning takes place for blue-collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution. We further show, that information on the productivity of an employee is to a large extend private.

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Evidence-based policy making is widely discussed in many countries as a way of ensuring more transparent and robust policies, and making policy-makers more accountable for meeting the needs and expectations of the constituencies they serve. In 2010, the [European Training Foundation] ETF launched the Torino Process with a view to offering interested partner countries a framework and technical support aimed at supporting progress in the [vocational education and training] VET area. The exercise, which will be repeated every two years, is ultimately intended to respond to the interest in robust assessment and in resources for VET policy making. This report presents the main findings of the Torino Process 2010, consolidating the findings of the individual country reports along the different dimensions deemed relevant to assessing VET systems and measuring VET policy progress.

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We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000 inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual's province of work reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 0.2-0.3 per cent. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Province's competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labor, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for 40 per cent of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be explained by the presence of negative large-city differentials in returns to education either. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the largest markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: every 100,000-inhabitant increase in the province's population raises entrepreneurs' net monthly income by 0.2-0.3 per cent.

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This report presents vocational education and training (VET) policy developments in the Montenegro between 2015 and 2019. It covers all five Europe-wide priority areas or medium-term deliverables (MTDs) agreed at Riga in June 2015. The five MTDs are: (1) MTD 1 - Work-based learning with special focus on apprenticeships; (2) MTD 2 - Quality assurance mechanisms in line with European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training (EQAVET) and continuous information and feedback loops to initial and continuing VET; (3) MTD 3 - Access to vocational education and training (VET) and qualifications for all through more flexible and permeable systems, guidance and validation of non-formal and informal learning; (4) MTD 4 – Key competences in both initial VET (IVET) and continuing VET (CVET); and (5) MTD 5 – Systematic initial and continuing professional development of VET teachers, trainers and mentors. The report has been drafted within the terms of the mandate given to the European Training Foundation (ETF) by the Riga Conclusions to monitor and analyse progress made by the EU candidate countries towards the MTDs. This document is based on the annual monitoring reports submitted by Montenegro to the ETF.

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One problem with the theory of firm-specific human capital is that it is difficult to generate convincing examples of investment that could generate the sometimes observed large and continuing effects on earnings. Another approach, called the ‘skill-weights’ view, allows all skills to be general in that there are other firms that use each of the skills. But firms use them in different combinations and with different weights attached to them. The skill-weights view not only has aesthetic appeal, but is consistent with the frequently observed large tenure effects. All of the implications of the traditional view are produced by this approach, and there are a number of other implications that distinguish the new view from the traditional one. The empirical evidence already contains some support for the skill-weights view.

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Recent theoretical studies suggest that migration prospects can raise the expected return to human capital and thus foster education investment at home or, in other words, induce a brain gain. In a recent paper (Beine, Docquier and Rapoport, Economic Journal, 2008) we used the Docquier and Marfouk (2006) data set on emigration rates by education level to examine the impact of brain drain migration on gross (pre-migration) human capital formation in developing countries. We found a positive effect of skilled migration prospects on human capital growth in a cross-section of 127 developing countries, with an elasticity of about five per cent. In this paper we assess the robustness of our results to the use of alternative brain drain measures, definitions of human capital, and functional forms. We find that the results hold using the Beine et al. (2007) alternative brain drain measures controlling for whether migrants acquired their skills in the home or in the host country. We also regress other indicators of human capital investment on skilled migration rates and find a positive effect on youth literacy while the effect on school enrolment depends on the exact specification chosen.

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