Professor Raul Eamets is the new Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Professor Eamets had two main motivations to run for the position of the dean: first his team that has promised to lead the faculty together with him and second the potential of the faculty in the society.

According to Eamets, the biggest challenges of the faculty include the decreasing number of potential students and the positioning of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration in the domain that will be created in 2016 on the basis of the new Statutes of the University of Tartu: “In the next few years, one of the most important topics will be cooperation in the domain of social sciences, both in terms of teaching and research. When it comes to teaching, the emphasis can only be on quality: we have to continue working towards internationalisation and why not consider more seriously the creation of joint curricula with both Estonian and foreign universities.”

In addition, Eamets finds it important to continue the work of the recently created Centre for Asian and Emerging Market Research, the Research and Innovation Policy Monitoring Programme (TIPS Programme) and the initiatives of entrepreneurship education.

Raul Eamets was born in 1964. In 1993, he defended his master’s thesis “Labour market and employment issues in Estonia” at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Tartu. In 2001, he defended his doctoral dissertation “Reallocation of labour during transition. Disequilibrium and policy issues: the case of Estonia” and got his doctoral degree.

Eamets has been active in the field of economics already since 1987 when he started to work as a researcher at the Department of Political Economy of Tartu State University. In 1998–2000 and 2002–2005 he was the Vice Dean for Research. Since 2005, Eamets is Professor of Macroeconomics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. From the same year, he is also the Head of the Institute of Economics.

His research topics include unemployment and labour market in transition societies, questions of labour market flexibility, the match between the education system and labour market, labour mobility, wage gap, the role of trade unions in transition countries, macroeconomic development of Estonia, etc. He has authored 140 academic publications.

Professor Eamets is a member of European Association of Labour Economists, a member of the Estonian Economics Association, a visiting research fellow of IZA (Bonn), the chair of the Fiscal Council and a member of the Academic Board of Social Statistics at the Estonian Statistical Office, to name a few.