On labour market discrimination against Roma in South East Europe

This paper directs interest on country-specific labour market discrimination Roma may suffer in South East Europe. The study lies in the tradition of statistical Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis. We use microdata from UNDP's 2004 survey of Roma minorities, and apply a Bayesian approach, proposed by Keith and LeSage for the decomposition analysis of wage differentials. This approach is based on a robust Bayesian heteroscedastic linear regression model in conjunction with Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation. The results obtained indicate the presence of labour market discrimination in Albania and Kosovo, but point to its absence in Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia.