The
Country Monograph
on
Vocational Education and Training Systems and Structures and Public and Private
Employment Services in
Second
draft, May, 2003
Authors
Mr Helmut
Zelloth – country manager of
Mr Jerzy
Wisniewsky – country manager of
Mr Bertil
Oskarsson – international expert,
Ms Solvita
Siliòa – expert of Latvian National Observatory;
Ms Baiba
Ramiòa – director of Latvian National Observatory;
Ms Inta
Paeglîte – national expert on financing and CVT;
Ms Inese
Cvetkova – national expert on VET and social dialogue;
Ms Ilze
Trapenciere – national expert on equal opportunities and labour market
Table of contents
2.Vocational education and training in the context of the
employment policy
List
of acronyms
CoM –
Cabinet of Ministers
CSB –
Central Statistical Bureau
CVT – continuing
vocational training
GDP – Gross
domestic product
EC –
European Commission
ESF –
European Social Fund
EU – the
European Union
HE – higher
education
IVET –
initial vocational education and training
LAEA –
Latvian Adult Education Association
LFS – labour
force survey
LLL – life
long learning
LVL –
Latvian currency
MIE –
measures of increasing employability
MoA –
Ministry of Agriculture
MoC –
Ministry of Culture
MoE – Ministry of Economics
MoES –
Ministry of Education and Science
MoF – Ministry
of Finance
MoH –
Ministry of Health
MoW –
Ministry of Welfare
NDP –
National Development Plan
NEP –
National Employment Plan
NRCVG –
National Resource Centre for Vocational Guidance
NTS –
National Tripartite Sub-council for Cooperation in VET and Employment
PEC -
Professional Education Centre
PES –
public employment services
PCCC –
Professional Career Counselling Centre
PPS –
purchasing power standard
PRES –
private employment services
PTCW – paid
temporary community works
SES – State
Employment Service
SME – small
and medium enterprises
VET –
vocational education and training
VTCED -
Vocational Training and Continuing Education Department
1. A
brief overview
The employment policy started in
The Concept “On Promotion of Employment” adopted by CoM in April, 1999.
Three main targets are set in this concept:
·
To
establish the system for developing the NEP; MoE was nominated as the
responsible for the NEP;
·
To
establish system for cooperation of state institutions, local governments,
employers and trade unions in solving employment problems; the of the National
Tripartite Sub-council (NTS) for Cooperation in Vocational Education and
Employment was founded to reach this target;
·
To
establish the system of the financing of NEP measures – the financing of NEP
measures is carried out through budget programmes of the responsible
ministries.
National Employment Plans
The first NEP of Latvia was developed in 2000
and it included 36 activities aimed at promotion of employment.
The NEP of 2001 was accepted by the CoM on
The NEP of 2002 was accepted by the CoM on
NEP 2002 respects goals of the employment
policy for the year 2005 and 2010 put forward in the
The EU Council in Stockholm,
supporting the goals for 2010 identified in Lisbon (employment rate 70%,
including that of women – 60%), offered to introduce interim tasks for 2005:
total employment rate– 67%, including that of women – 57%; 50% employment rate
should be reached by persons aged 55-64 by the year 2010.
86 employment promotion activities of NEP 2002 are grouped into four activity areas:
- perfection of labour capacity,
- development of business activity and creation of jobs,
- promotion of adaptation capacity of enterprises and employees,
- implementation of equal opportunity policy.
Key tasks in the area of perfection of labour
capacity:
-
SES in co-operation with other institutions (educational establishments,
local governments, etc.) and employers within the scope of the allocated budget
resources plans: to train and retrain at least 4 thousand unemployed during the
year; to involve 18 thousand unemployed in the activities of job seekers’
clubs, to employ in temporary paid public works in the average 4 thousand
unemployed per month. However, due to the reduction of financing by 57%
(excluding stipends) the number of unemployed persons involved in training and
retraining will be by 55% less than in 2001;
-
bigger emphasis is laid on involvement of young-aged unemployed in
active employment measures, especially, during the first 6 months of
unemployment and prevention of
long-term unemployment. For this purpose, implementation of the pilot project
“Practice of young aged unemployed with the employer” will be continued
involving at least 200 young unemployed;
-
it is planned to extend the scope of active employment measures through
implementation of pilot projects for improvement of competitiveness of the
unemployed in the labour market. The pilot project “Social enterprises to
employ less competitive unemployed” initially will allow to create 100 jobs
employing long-term and pre-pension age unemployed and in future years allowing
to substantially increase the number of such jobs. A new project “Subsidised
jobs for pre-pension age unemployed” foresees creation of 200 new jobs by the
end of the year. Implementation of the project “Subsidised jobs for the
disabled unemployed” will be continued.
In the area of promoting business activity bigger attention will be devoted to elimination of obstacles and
promotion of start of the business activity. Further perfection of services for
taxpayers is planned alongside with enforcement of unified tax legislation,
using electronic means of communication, creation of centralised telephone
lines to inform taxpayers. The plan of perfection of business environment will
be improved, specified and supplemented.
Within the framework of the
National Program for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises for 2002-2006 it
is planned to achieve in the coming years an essential growth of the number of
business starters, recently founded enterprises and growing businesses (in the average
by 250 enterprises each year).
Proposals to reorganise business
support funds will be developed. In the second phase of implementation of SME
crediting program (Latvian Mortgage and Land Bank) it is planned to issue loans
for the amount of 7.5 million LVL, which is two times more than in the
preceding year, thus potentially creating 440 new jobs.
Measures aimed at promoting
creation of new jobs in rural areas will be carried out. For this purpose it is
planned to implement support measures of the sub-program on “Diversification of
rural economy, promoting alternative revenue sources” within the framework of
SAPARD Latvian Agriculture and Rural Development Program, etc.
On the regional level it is planned
to work out concrete SES and regional (urban) local governments’ employment
promotion plans, as well as implementation of projects within the PHARE 2000
National Program for Economic and Social Cohesion.
In the area of
promoting adaptation capacities of enterprises and employees it is planned
to continue tripartite and bipartite co-operation between social partners
supported also by the EU PHARE projects “Promotion of Bipartite Social Dialogue
in
Confederation of Employers of Latvia and
Latvian Free Trade Union Confederation will carry out activities to harmonise
industrial relations with the new Labour Law, to optimise individual work
contacts and collective agreements, to motivate employers to invest in
retraining of employees and increase of labour quality.
In the area of equal
opportunities it is
planned to implement activities aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for both
men and women in the labour market:
- supporting availability of data about genders and unemployment and
implementation of active employment measures;
- involving the unemployed in active employment measures paying
attention to the share of men and women in the total number of unemployed;
- reducing gender differences related to employment and revenues from
work;
- starting
implementation of a new pilot project “Integration in the Labour Market of
Unemployed Beneficiaries of the Child Care Benefits”.
In should be stressed that NEP are developed
for one year, however, the middle term employment strategy is missing in
National Development Plan (NDP) was accepted by the Cabinet of
Ministers on
It foresees under the priority – Development of
human resources and promotion of employability – the following activities:
-
To
increase the quality of labour force according to labour market demands;
-
To
implement active labour market polity to promote employability;
-
To
develop social infrastructure and services.
The Parliament adopted on
The
draft of Single Programming Document for 2004 – 2006 adopted by the CoM on
-
The
promotion of employment (43% of total priority financing are allocated to this
measure).
-
The
development of education and continuing training (38%);
-
Combating
social exclusion (19%);
The
following indicators are foreseen for the results:
·
Decrease
of unemployment rate by 1 percentage point (indicator for 2001 is 13.1%, Source
of information: CSB)
·
Decreased
share of long-term unemployed out of total number of jobseekers by 2 percentage
points (Indicator for 2001 is 55.6%; Source of information: CSB)
·
Growth
of share of professional education programmes and corresponding competence
based examination standards by 18 percentage points (the amount for 2002 is
12%: Source of information: MoES)
In accordance with the provisions
of the Accession Partnership, the Government of Latvia has signed on
According to the Population Census 2000, the
population of
GDP has increased since 1995, but GDP per
capita according to purchasing power standards was only 33% of EU average in
2001.
Picture
1
GDP – 1995
= 100%; estimation for 2002.
Sources: CSB data, Economic Development of
Latvia –
The registered unemployment rate
has not considerably changed during the last years. It was 7.6% at the end of
2002. It went up in 1999 due to the economic crisis in
There is an evident difference
between the registered unemployment rate and the unemployment rate calculated
from the LFSs. The main reason can be that people are interested to register
only while they can get unemployment benefit.
Almost the half (41.8%) of all
registered unemployed in 2001[4]
had secondary vocational education; 27.8% had secondary general education,
21.3% had basic education, and only 7.1% had higher education. It means that
the great part of unemployed have out of date vocational skills and they need
retraining or just confidence in their ability to improve their lives doing
something else.
The share of registered unemployed by ethnicity
does not differ a lot from the share of population by ethnicity.
Table 7:
Share of population and unemployed by ethnicity in 2001(%).
|
|
Total population |
Registered unemployed |
|
Latvians |
57.9 |
51.1 |
|
Russians |
29.4 |
35.2 |
|
Belarussians |
4.0 |
4.7 |
|
Ukrainians |
2.7 |
2.9 |
|
Poles |
2.5 |
2.9 |
|
Lithuanians |
1.4 |
1.4 |
|
Jews |
0.4 |
0.1 |
|
Other |
1.7 |
1.7 |
Source: Statistical Yearbook of
Employment rate in
Table 8:
Employment rate (employed persons aged 15-64 as a share of the total population
of the same age group) 2000, 2001.
|
|
Latvia 2000 |
EU 2000 |
Latvia 2001 |
EU 2001 |
|
Total |
57.8 |
63.4 |
58.7 |
64.1 |
|
Females |
53.9 |
54.1 |
55.0 |
55.7 |
|
Males |
61.9 |
72.8 |
61.9 |
73.1 |
Source: http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat/html
Employment
rate differs from region to region. The highest employment is in
The structural changes in economy reflect in the
structural changes of employed. The proportion of employed in private sector is
growing due to privatisation and other private initiatives.
Table 9:
Proportion of employment in the public and private sectors %, 1992- 2001.
|
|
1992 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
2000 |
2001 |
|
Public |
59 |
40 |
37 |
34 |
32 |
30 |
29 |
28 |
|
Private |
41 |
60 |
63 |
66 |
68 |
70 |
71 |
72 |
Sources: Statistical Yearbook of Latvia 2001 –
The
structural changes reflect also in share of employed by kind of activity.
Table 10:
Share of employed persons by kind of activity, %.
|
|
1996 |
1998 |
2000 |
2001 |
|
Agriculture and fishing |
17 |
19 |
14 |
15 |
|
Industry and construction |
27 |
27 |
26 |
23 |
|
Services |
56 |
54 |
60 |
62 |
Source: Statistical Yearbook of
It seems that employed in
agriculture will continue to decrease as only 4% were employed in these sectors
in EU in 1999, but in services increase (65% in EU in 1999).
The main challenge of the Latvian labour market
policy is to react to the changes in economy and to foresee the fields and
activities in which labour force will be needed. The educational system may
help in this fast changing situation by preparing people with well developed
basic skills and self – motivation who are ready (and have possibilities) to
learn life long and to change their career according to the structural changes
in economy.