Equal Economic Opportunities

The Equal Economic Opportunities Programme aims to advance ECMI’s expertise on issues relating to the participation of minorities in economic life. Specifically the programme has two goals: first to advance theoretical understanding of economic inclusion/exclusion of minorities, and then to provide practical advice to national governments and other relevant policy-making bodies on how to devise policies to combat the problem of economic marginalisation.

Minorities’ ability to participate in economic life is strongly affected by the context in which they live. This context refers to a number of different situational variables including: (1) the extent to which minorities are dispersed across the territory of the state or are geographically concentrated; (2) the location of minorities, e.g. in the capital city, in deprived urban regions or in the rural periphery; (3) the presence or absence of a kin-state and the relationship of the host state therewith; and (4) general socio-economic processes that are taking place in the country or region concerned, such as privatization or rapid integration into the global economy. Minority participation in economic life is also dependent on often quite localized informal institutions, such as the existence of (often monoethnic) economic networks, as well as minorities’ own expectations of their ‘place’ within society – expectations that may have been forged over the course of several generations. ECMI’s ability to provide advice on the issue of economic participation is therefore dependent on its understanding of these different contexts and of how certain policies may affect minorities in different ways in different contextual settings. For this reason, it is necessary first to conduct research in order to devise a methodology on how to deal with the problem of economic participation and then to think about how to apply that methodology.

Modalities of the Programme

While equal opportunities for minorities has long been a focus of concern within the field of human rights, little work has been carried out on how to promote equal economic opportunities for members of minorities, despite a few declarative statements in a number of legal instruments that are intended to protect members of national minorities from economic discrimination. Similarly, although social exclusion in general (with which economic exclusion is often associated) has been a focus of EU policy-making since the launch of the so-called Lisbon Strategy in 2000, few attempts have been made to shed light on the link between social and economic exclusion on the one hand, and ethnicity on the other.

The research will be conducted in geographical regions of the EU and the EU neighbourhood in which members of national minorities are concentrated. Mostly, these regions will correspond to EUROSTAT’s NUTS system of classification, which demarcates territorial units for the purpose of producing regional statistics for the EU. The choice of NUTS regions is based on the hope that the research will assist states and donors to better target regional development programmes and the disbursement of EU structural funds, which are allocated according to the NUTS criteria or – in the case of aspiring EU members – to elaborate a development programme that is compatible with eventual EU membership. If the research is to lay the foundation for action-oriented programmes aimed at the economic development of national minority regions, it is logical that the focus of the research should correspond to those regions in which such programmes can best be implemented.