An Evaluation of the Short-term Skills Trainings Targeting the Roma Ethnic Minority

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of short-term skills trainings targeting youth in the Roma ethnic minority. In order to better understand the impact of the program, we contrast outcomes of Roma and non-Roma. Participants of these short-term skills trainings were predominantly males in their twenties. The impact estimates of skills trainings for Roma are 15.55 percentage points while for non-Roma we find an impact of 28.60 percentage points. In international comparisons these impacts are very large suggesting that the program has an exceptionally high impact on participants. It is difficult to pinpoint the reasons why Roma and non-Roma have different impact estimates, but potential explanations are differences in background characteristics (education and working experience) and differences in the content of the trainings that these two groups attended.