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Today: May 17, 2008 Statistics

Economic Policy Institutes Network (EPIN)

Creation of Economic Policy Institutes Network (EPIN) was initiated and is being implemented through the efforts of UNDP Regional Center for Europe and CIS in order to support development of economic policy institutes (EPI) in transition countries of the region, with particular emphasis on low and middle income countries. The principal goal of the initiative is to develop the capacity of EPIs in the target countries so as to provide these countries with independent, sophisticated voices in policy issues.

In this regard EPIN will have two major project components:

  1. Research Capacity Development;
  2. Managerial and Administrative Capacity Development.

EPIN members will be represented by Target institutes, institutes from a low or middle income country in the post-soviet region, and Resource institute, institutes from a high income country in the post-soviet region (new EU member states and Russia).


EPIN institutes

Resource

Target

Partners

The approach to build research capacity development in the target economic policy institutes will be based on combination of training and mentored research (on-job/by-doing learning). The researchers in the target institutes will be trained and mentored by the experts from "resource" institutes. Since EPIN promotes East-East Cooperation the "resource" institutes will be from the new EU member states.

Major areas for research should be relevant to acute issues in the target countries and fit the mandate of UNDP.

Suggested Research Areas include, but not limited to:

  • Trade: exploring strengths and weaknesses of, and links between, different forms of economic integration (preferential trading arrangements) for different sub-regions: WTO accession, EU accession, Stability Pact's bilateral free trade agreements, accession to the Central European Free Trade Area, intra CIS/Central Asian trading agreements, etc;
  • Labour market/social policy issues: comparisons of poverty definitions, data, mappings, monitoring processes; labour market trends (unemployment, participation rates, gender and ethnic dimensions of labour market activities); social policy reforms (pension, health reforms, targeting issues, active labour market policies);
  • Private sector development: Micro and Small Enterprises, comparison of definitions, taxations, customs, access to markets (Russia, China, EU, and Afghanistan).

The component aimed at building capacity in conducting research will help deliver the following outputs:

  1. The whole number of high quality research papers produced;
  2. Improved research capacity in the target EPIs;
  3. Established contacts/networking between institutes both in the sub-region and region as a whole;
  4. Creation of knowledge base, where research papers and training materials would be accessible to other think tanks in the region.

Special emphasis will be devoted to building training guides, manuals and materials to be placed on website as well, therefore, providing more opportunities for larger think tank community in the target countries and the region.

The component on managerial capacity development will first be addressed on the lowest/smallest possible level - a lot of questions might be easily answered by providing receiver EPIs with resources for self-instruction and with (online and phone) contacts in the providing think tanks. More substantial development issues and demands that cannot be fulfilled through publications and mere communication, actual face-to-face training mechanisms will be used. These would include workshops and secondments.

Visit the EPIN web-site at: http://europeandcis.undp.org/go/epin