Abstract

This chapter concerns the evolution of labour markets and labour market institutions and policies in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as of Central Asia over the last two decades. As the dynamics of labour market outcomes in these transition economies (TEs) have drawn considerable attention already in the early years of transition and resulted in a voluminous literature easily available elsewhere, we only provide here a brief summary of the topic. Instead, we focus on the much less explored issue of the evolution of labour market institutions, which are among candidate explanations for the very diverse trajectories of labour markets in the region. We consider recent contributions that attempt to assess the effect of labour market institutions on labour market performance of TEs, including the policy-relevant issue of the complementarity of institutions.