Unemployment And Unemployment Protection In Transition Economies

Vera Brusentsev and Wayne Vroman ()
Additional contact information
Wayne Vroman: The Urban Institute, Washington, DC

No 08-15, Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics

Abstract: Nearly twenty years have passed since the transition from a centrally-planned towards a market-oriented economy in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (CEE-FSU). This paper documents the differing patterns of unemployment during the period 1990 to 2006 in the 28 countries that constitute the CEE-FSU group and outlines how unemployment protection programs developed in response. We also suggest some tentative explanations for the observed trends in unemployment and unemployment compensation. Our approach is novel in that we compare the performance of the CEE-FSU group to the worldwide average and to other major economies. In addition, we demonstrate important contrasts across the CEE-FSU sub-regions. Similar to other research in the area, this paper demonstrates significantly below-average income growth between 1990 and 1995 but then significantly above-average growth in the years since 1995 when compared with the worldwide average. We also show a significant link between output growth and employment growth for many individual countries from the region. The transition economies developed new institutions to measure and offset the effects of the new phenomenon of open unemployment. The majority instituted labor force surveys to measure unemployment and all but one (Tajikistan) established unemployment compensation (UC) programs. Our analysis of unemployment rates finds that they have been high in many of these countries but, when placed within a global context, the CEE-FSU averages during 1994-1996 and again during 2004-2006 were only somewhat higher than the average unemployment rates in other major countries with labor surveys.

Keywords: transition economics; economic growth; unemployment; unemployment compensation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 J4 J6 P2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://graduate.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/file ... 2008/UDWP2008-15.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://graduate.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2008/UDWP2008-15.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2008/UDWP2008-15.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dlw:wpaper:08-15.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Saul Hoffman ().