The adjustment of labour markets during transition has been quite different from that anticipated by the Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) literature. In particular, it has involved stagnant unemployment pools, large flows to inactivity and strikingly low workers' mobility especially when...

This paper sheds light on the difficulties of pension reforms by analyzing the citizens´opinions on different aspects of the welfare state and its redistributive programs. We focus on the pension system, reporting the results of a questionnaire conducted in Germany and Italy in the Fall 2001....

In the Italian public debate growing attention has been recently paid to “household impoverishment”. Subjective indicators of economic condition show that this concern reflects a common sentiment of the Italian population. On the other hand, estimates based on the Bank of Italy’s Survey of...

Non-employment rates in all central and eastern European countries have increased dranatically thoroughout the transition and are currently larger than those of the lowest income OECD countries. Non-employment benefits other than unemployment benefits are providing income support to this growing...

Several lessons can be drawn from the natural experiments of central and eastern European countries with labour market policies. Two of them are particularly relevant also for OECD countries. First, it is not wise to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits when the length of unemployment...

The literature on the economics of transition has devoted little, if any, attention to labour supply. We show in this paper that, properly accounting for labour supply adjustments permit to understand some of the most puzzling features of transition, such as the output fall, the strikingly low...

Ten years after the start of transition, there are many puzzles we still have to live with. Why did all countries experience strong declines in output at the outset of economic transformations and most of them are slowly, if at all, recovering from this "transitional recession"? How can these...

"Der Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, die betriebliche Dynamik der Beschäftigungsentwicklung statistisch zu beschreiben. Als Datenbasis dient eine aus der Beschäftigtenstatistik gewonnene Datei, mit der die Beschäftigungsentwicklung von allen Betrieben verfolgt werden kann, die im Zeitraum...