A rapid decrease in unemployment is a short-term priority to limit social problems and reduce the risk of rising structural unemployment. To this end, strengthening labour market policies to sustain labour demand is key. The public works programme should remain temporary and become more focused...

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of employment determination in four transition economies as they move from central planning to a market economy in the early 1990s. We use firm level panel data sets from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to estimate dynamic...

This paper looks at one of the major contributor to low overall employment rate in Hungary, the very low activity of the elderly. Although there are scattered pieces of evidence about the social security system in general having substantial influence on incentives and activity, the actual...

We analyze the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Contrary to workers’ fears, our fixed effect and random trend estimates imply little effect of domestic privatization, except for a slight negative effect in Russia, and they provide some...

This paper proposes a simple and transparent methodology for decomposing changes in the aggregate labour force participation rate over time into changes in the labour force participation behaviour of different population groups and changes in each group’s population share. Unlike traditional...