The cost of marginalisation

High rise, low prospects: many Roma communities are effectively segregated from the rest of society. Photograph: Julie Denesha

Millions of Roma in Europe live in marginalisation and face social exclusion. They cannot find jobs, their children are out of school or learning less than their non-Roma peers, and they face access barriers to health services. Many Roma families live in ghettoised settlements in terrible housing conditions. Though European citizens, they do not have equal opportunities. This is a human rights and social tragedy.

Yet what is often overlooked is that social exclusion of the Roma is also an economic tragedy. It comes at a considerable cost to the economies of central and south-eastern Europe. Taking the Czech Republic as an example, recent research by the World Bank reveals that social exclusion of about 50,000 Roma living in marginalised localities alone may have resulted in losses of hundreds of millions of euros in 2008. How come? Because the productive contribution of Roma to the economy is a lot lower than it could be. Roma are less likely to be employed, and those who are employed often work in low skilled jobs with low pay and low value added.

Low education levels are the main explanation for this. Few Roma graduate from secondary education and fewer still from universities. While drop-out is a major challenge, it also appears that Roma children in school often face inadequate learning environments. Many Roma children in Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere attend segregated Roma-only schools, often with poor teaching and learning conditions. Emerging information from external student assessments in Bulgaria documents the dramatically lower learning achievement in these schools compared to integrated schools. Even worse, Roma youngsters in many countries are disproportionately enrolled in special schools for children with learning disabilities.

As a result, many Roma from socially disadvantaged backgrounds leave school with poor skills and ill-prepared for the labour market. In the Czech Republic, the World Bank conducted a functional literacy assessment among Roma living in marginalised communities. The result was shocking, with two-thirds facing medium to severe functional illiteracy. With Czech employers increasingly looking for highly skilled workers, there are few jobs left for the unskilled.

This is why few Roma are in stable jobs, and many are discouraged after years of unsuccessful job searching. A lack of employment opportunities means that many Roma families are long-term social welfare beneficiaries. This translates into budgetary costs to the government, with lower tax revenue and higher social protection outlays. More importantly, social exclusion and marginalisation tend to transmit from one generation to the next. Children growing up in jobless households usually do worse in school and drop out earlier – and end up facing the same difficulties as their parents. The result is an endless cycle of marginalisation.

How to break up this cycle? First, there is a strong economic case for investments in the social inclusion of the Roma, in particular through education, and governments need to make this case to the sceptical or even hostile majority populations. Second, efforts to promote social inclusion of the Roma are likely to be most effective if focused on promoting access to quality early childhood education programmes for Roma children between the ages of one and six. Numerous studies worldwide have demonstrated the high long-term economic benefits of early childhood programmes through increased years of schooling and better academic achievements, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. These findings suggest that a focus on investing in human capital right from the start is a particularly promising instrument for fostering Roma inclusion.

The solution to the challenge of social exclusion lies in greater political commitment and better and more integrated public policies: real change will only materialise once the issue of Roma exclusion moves from the margins of the social debate to the centre of policymaking. Governments need to overcome both bureaucratic and discriminatory barriers that keep Roma out of mainstream society by ensuring that public policies and services, for example in education, work for all citizens, including the Roma.

Central and south-eastern Europe is ageing rapidly. So it is in the interest of future economic growth and prosperity that governments invest in Roma inclusion policies today. With shrinking populations across much of the continent, Europe cannot afford to let the potential talents of one single person go unused, let alone millions.