After Central and Eastern European and Central Asian economies abandoned central planning, nearly 195 million workers had to adjust to new rules of work and life. Most transition economies have not yet fully committed themselves to the rules of the market place. A few that have are already...

The author seeks to determine the main factors behind poor labor market outcomes in Bulgaria. Unemployment in Bulgaria is high and of long duration. The accumulation of the unemployment stock has been caused by relatively high inflows into unemployment coupled with limited outflows. These...

Latvia has recorded sustained GDP and productivity growth since 1997. Yet unemployment rates, despite gradual decrease, have remained high. The paper explores the mysteries of unemployment in Latvia. It analyzes labor flows between employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation and finds the...

Unusually rich administrative data sets covering both firms and workers enabled the authors to study displacement in Slovenia during 1987-93. They describe displacement trends and the characteristics of displaced workers comparing them to those in North America during a major recession. They...

The objectives of this paper are : (i) to empirically probe on the validity of the hypothesis that wages are relatively unresponsive to labor market disequlibrium; and (ii) to investigate whether the dramatically diverse rates of unemployment observed across certain Latin American countries obey...

Transition economies have introduced a range of OECD active labor market policies to combat unemployment - albeit often on paper only, as with rising unemployment passive policies have crowded out active ones. But even in the Czech Republic, active labor market policies have contributed only...

Sri Lanka has had double-digit unemployment rates for more than a decade.And by 1990, 85 percent of the unemployed had spent more than a year searching for a job. Rama analyzes whether high unemployment rates and long spells of unemployment are the result of profuse legislation of the labor...

Sri Lanka's high unemployment rate has been attributed to a mismatch of skills, to queuing for public sector jobs, and to stringent job security regulations. But the empirical evidence supporting these explanations is weak. The author takes a fresh look at the country's unemployment problem,...

Between 1990 and 1992 in Slovenia, recipients of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits tended to remain (formally) unemployed until their benefits expired, before taking a job. Institutional set-up suggests, and labor surveys show, that many of the recipients were actually working while...

Economic transition in Bulgaria has been associated with the emergence of unemployment, the fall in real wages and a substantial increase in wage inequality. The ranks of low-paid workers have grown and their relative wage status has substantially deteriorated. Unemployment is of long duration....