TRANSITION OF LABOR MARKETS IN SOUTH EAST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES DURING ECONOMIC CRISIS

Labor markets of South East Europe are going through deep and significant changes typical for transitional period of economy but prolonged and deepened by economic depression which started in 2008 and continues even today. In the SEE countries the key labor market indicators were much lower in comparison with West European economies. The general idea in this paper is to compare the labor markets of the countries in the region across different variables and to discover the main characteristics of the regional labor market during economic depression. Through implementation of multivariate analysis changes in the last three years were monitored and key features were identified. On the basis of situation in the last few years we can conclude that countries of SEE have the constant and even growing problems on the labor markets characterized by large unemployment, long term unemployment and structural mismatches.