JAVNI POZIV ZA SEE&CIS TAKMIČENJE U ISTRAŽIVANJU KOJE SE ODVIJA U SKLOPU PROJEKTA GLOBALNE RAZVOJNE MREŽE JUGOISTOČNE EVROPE

wiiw GDN-SEE&CIS Announces Research Competition 2011

The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw), with financial support from the Global Development Network (GDN), the Austrian Ministry of Finance and the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), announces a SEE & CIS research competition within the framework of the wiiw Global Development Network Southeast Europe (wiiw GDN-SEE) research project.

Proposals are invited from economists and other social scientists. Projects with a significant commercial aspect or those that seek the funding of the dissemination of previous results (such as book preparation) rather than original research are explicitly excluded.

Proposals must be postmarked by 15 May 2011.

For the competition, the following topic has been identified:

‘Crisis Effects: Growth Prospects, Social Impact and Policy Responses in SEE and CIS’

The main hypothesis to be tested is the following: The crisis shock introduces structural breaks in the distribution (e.g. increase of inequality) across different dimensions conditional on the change in potential speed of growth, the quality of development, and the induced or adopted policy changes.

The areas of research are the following:
· Macroeconomic effects: Financial flows and inequality; Distributional effects of public spending; Intergenerational justice and investments
· Microeconomic effects: Crisis effects on income and poverty
· Policy response: Incomes policy; Fiscal policy; Monetary policy
· Improving labour market institutions: Wage setting process; Organisation of vocational training and skill upgrading; Potentials for improved social partnership
· Political economy implications: Including social responses and institutional changes

For a more detailed description of the research area, please download the wiiw GDN-SEE project proposal at:
Read carefully the whole proposal and especially section 2.3.

Details

• Funding for individual projects will range between € 5,000 and € 8,000. Grants may begin as soon as 01 July 2011 and end no later than 30 November 2012.
• Depending on the size of the individual grants, the research competition will reward up to 12 grants.
• Applicants from outside the Southeast European region[1] and the Commonwealth of Independent States[2] will not be excluded a priori, however one of the goals of the wiiw GDN-SEE&CIS project is regional capacity building. Thus, each research team should include at least one young researcher (up to 35 years of age) from the region.
• Applications may be submitted by individuals or teams of researchers. No applicant can submit or be a part of more than one proposal.
• Funds for accepted projects will be released according to the following schedule: one-third upon award of the grant, one-third upon the receipt of a progress report at the mid-point of the research, and one-third upon the receipt of the final deliverables of the project. Where this schedule would constitute a serious hindrance to the proposed research, the applicant may petition for funds to be released on a different schedule after the award of the grant. Final deliverables must include at least one formal research paper that has been submitted to an international peer-reviewed journal. Proof of submission will be required.
• All successful applicants should agree to come to Vienna to present the results of the research at a seminar at wiiw’s expense. In addition we anticipate smaller workshops involving recipients in the various thematic areas held at wiiw in order to encourage links across researchers.


Proposal Submission

• A complete printed copy of all proposals must be submitted. In addition, all materials should be sent by email in Word (.doc) or Acrobat (.pdf) format. All proposals must be submitted in English.
• Proposals must be postmarked by 15 May 2011 at the latest and sent to:

wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Wien, Austria.

The emails should be sent at the same time to:

research.competition@wiiw.ac.at.


Proposals must include the following components:

• A cover sheet clearly specifying the project title, research area, names of principal researchers, mailing address and e-mail contact addresses (e-mail will be used for follow-up requests).
• An abstract of no more than 200 words outlining the significance of the research and the methodology to be used.
• A research proposal of no more than ten (10) double-spaced, serially numbered, pages showing sufficient familiarity with the topic and methodology to provide confidence in the project’s successful completion.
• The research proposal must contain the following sections: introduction and motivation; research question; short literature review; detailed methodology section explaining how to answer the research question; discussion of expected results; references (including name of author, date of publication, title, publisher, place of publication).
• CVs of all principal researchers.
• A budget showing expenses in all categories. While the categories will vary from grant to grant, they should, where applicable, include as a minimum: salaries and other compensation for the grantee(s) (including payroll taxes and fringe benefits); salaries and other compensation for research assistants and clerical personnel (including payroll taxes and fringe benefits); English editing fees; grant related travel; data and software purchases; Institutional overhead.


Proposal Review Process

Applications will be screened to ensure that they fall within the terms of reference for proposals. Final selection of the proposals will be made in consideration of the evaluation of the criteria enumerated below.


Evaluation Criteria

The primary criterion will be the scientific merit of the proposed research. Scientific merit will be evaluated based on:

• Clarity of the proposed research question.
• Originality (preference will be given to projects that develop new methodologies or use the transition experience to obtain new insights into fundamental questions rather than those that call for mechanistic application of conventional techniques to new data).
• Use of the most appropriate and state of the art techniques.
• Policy relevance.
• Capacity building (the impact the proposal will have in bringing new researchers into the international research community and in forging links between new researchers and established scholars).
• Budget.
• Competence of the principal investigator(s).

Other things being equal, preference will be given to projects that:
• Are cost effective. Smaller proposals will receive priority over larger ones in order to increase the number of projects that can be funded.
• Increase the geographic, disciplinary, ethnic, gender, or other diversity of funded proposals.

Questions and inquiries may be addressed to: research.competition@wiiw.ac.at
Here Southeast Europe is defined to include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia as well as Turkey. CIS is defined to include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.