Name and Surname
Jelena Žarković
Affiliation
The Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade
Contact email
zarkovic@ekof.bg.ac.rs
Short Biography
Jelena Žarković is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Belgrade. From 2012 to 2021, she was the director of one of the leading research centers in the country: the Foundation for the Development of Economic Science.
Her main research interests are the effects of tax policies and social benefits on poverty and inequality in income distribution as well as the labor market. She is also the Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Inequality at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics. She participated as a project coordinator and/or researcher in a number of projects funded by the European Union, the World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. She participated in numerous conferences in Serbia and abroad and published articles in journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Economics of Transition, Post-Communist Economies, International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations and Panoeconomicus.
Research abstract
This research project seeks to examine the causes of very high child poverty in Serbia as well as to propose policies that would reduce poverty and inequality. Using the latest data from the Survey on Income and Living Conditions and using probit methods, the probability of a child being poor is estimated depending on a number of socio-economic characteristics of the family: parents’ level of education, their status in the labor market, as well as the size and structure of the household, region and type of settlement. This project also examines the impact of tax policy and social transfers on child poverty. Previous research has shown that our system of taxes and social benefits has very little redistributive potential. Recent data show that the already low coverage of poor children by social benefits has been further reduced in recent years.