The Consortium
Economica Institute
Economica is a leading, non-university economic research institute in the German-speaking world, specialized in advanced quantitative methods and large data management. Since its founding in 2005, Economica has provided evidence-based solutions bridging academia and professional practice for governments, public institutions, and private sectors. Operating independently under the motto "Relevant Economics," the institute selects its research agenda and partners autonomously. Economica focuses on analyzing and shaping economic structural changes and associated social processes, employing state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical methods. Funded entirely through national and international project-based research, Econimica receives no core public funding, ensuring complete governance autonomy. The institute maintains high standards of academic integrity, innovative solutions, and employment diversity, emphasizing gender parity and stable service contracts.Economica is part of the Cognion Research Network, a group of socio-economic and natural science institutes located in Austria, Germany, and Slovakia, with its headquarters in Vienna.
Dr. Alexander Chvorostov
Team Leader
The Coordination team and the consortium is led by Dr. Alexander Chvorostov, an experienced coordinator of research and consulting endeavours, who has administered almost two dozen of international large- and mid-scale projects (funded by the EC, WB, UNEP, DFID, OSI, etc.) since late 1990s. Since the early 2000s, he concentrated mostly on the development and coordination of international projects funded through various EU framework programs, such as FP5, FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe, as well as the past development programs INTAS and TACIS. Dr. Chvorostov is a fellow sociologist and his major research and teaching fields constitute various subjects in the Sociology of Education; his further specializations include empirical methods of social research, as well as international comparative research programs. In EDU-LAB, he leads WP6 and WP7 and co-leads WP3 (the part related to OSES). The further member of the coordination team is Prof. David Campbell, who is a world-wide renown expert in the studies of democracy and technological progress and their implications for education and social well-being; Prof. Campbell works for various universities in Austria and is co-editor in numerous project-relevant publishing houses; he co-leads WP5 and contributes to WP1-2-3-4. Another part of the team is a fellow econometrist and mathematician Dr. Xiaoshan Liu, who contributes to several specific modelling and data-assessment tasks in WP1-2-3 and assists other project teams in the conceptual selection of data and their thematic processing. ECONOMICA has sufficient administrative and technological capacities, as well as know-how to host and manage large-scale multi-team international projects. Other research fellows and assistants will be employed in ad-hoc mode as needed.