Employment Protection Legislation in Central and East European Countries

This article presents updated indicators of employment protection legislation for several central and eastern European countries according to OECD methodology. Common patterns and outliers are identified and additional information is provided to interpret correctly the strictness of the regulatory environment. The aim is to provide some hard evidence for the debate regarding the interface between employment protection legislation and labour markets and welfare, based on the legislations applying in central and east European countries at the end of 2003. The article focuses on the 22 aspects of employment regulation encompassed within the OECD model, examining how each relates to the employment protection legislation in force in each country, and scores each one based on the relative restrictiveness of the regulation. The article concludes that the occurrence of informal arrangements complicates the picture but that this does not invalidate the usefulness of examining formal rules in detail.