Since October 2024, the Institute of Economics is participating in the project entitled Identifying the causes of long-term unemployment among older women in Serbia and North Macedonia, which has been approved under the Visegrad+ grant scheme, based on the evaluation of applications submitted under the second call in 2024. The project is co-financed by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the Fund is to promote the idea of sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. The project will run for 18 months in Serbia and North Macedonia and will be implemented by a consortium led by the Institute of Economic Sciences (Serbia) and consisting of the Institute of Economics at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (North Macedonia), the Institute of Economics, Slovak Academy of Sciences and the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów (Poland).
The main mission of the project is to find out what prevents women over 50 from finding jobs in the local labour markets in the regions of Belgrade and Skopje. Based on experiences from Slovakia and Poland, a set of tools will be developed to assess their employability in order to better respond to emerging job opportunities. Women over 50 are considered a disadvantaged group, which allows them to participate in active labour market policies. However, due to precarious employment and longer periods of previous unemployment, they have little chance of re-employment, which discourages them and worsens their labour market situation.