Do Labour Market Institutions Matter in Transition Economies? An Analysis of Labour Market Flexibility in the Late Nineties

Labor Market Institutions and Labor Market Performance: What Can We Learn from Transition Countries?

“…Several scholars have already attempted to describe the evolution of labor market institutions and policies in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as to analyze links between these institutions and policies and the performance of labor markets (e.g., Boeri and Terrel 2002;Cazes 2002;Fialova and Schneider 2009). Besides presenting evidence from this large and important region, several such studies were motivated by the idea that the transition environment provides the researcher with a unique laboratory for hypothesis testing (e.g., Svejnar 1999;Boeri and Lehmann 1999).…”

“…So, while labor market outcomes are measured in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008, data on institutions and policies come from the years 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007. Similar to most other studies, we control for omitted factors (including unobserved characteristics of countries) by using random-or fixed-effects specifications of our regression 15 Change in inflation is the key control variable introduced in Nickell (1997) to account for the deviation of the unemployment rate from its natural level and is used in most subsequent studies. As there are concerns about the appropriateness of this measure in the transition context (Cazes 2002), our baseline specification includes a measure of a recent change in GDP, which aims to better account for macroeconomic shocks to which transition economies were still prone to even after the initial recession of the late 1980s -early 1990s. 16 We also have considered several additional control variables, such as proxies for the enforcement of institutions, which is likely to be sub-optimal in the countries studied.…”

Are the New EU Member States Prepared for the Flexicurity System?

“…After 1987, registered unemployment also started to increase. Because of economic restructuring and higher efficiency in the distribution of production factors, employment security decreased in the majority of NMS-12 after 1990 (Cazes 2002). …”

New Keynesian Macroeconomics: Empirically Tested in the Case of Republic of Macedonia

“…In the part where we use data we will investigate this relation with data for Macedonian macroeconomic aggregates 3 . Since, 1991 Macedonia has gone from command to a market economy (process called transition).…”