This paper develops a model of the process of reallocation of labor from the state sector to the private sector. When growth is exogenously determined, we show that in the initial stages of transition unemployment will rise over time. After a critical stage in the transition process, restructuring is accompanied by a decline in unemployment. When growth is endogenously determined, and human capital is acquired by learning-by-doing, we show that whether restructuring eventually occurs is determined by the level of human capital in the private sector and the rate of unemployment. The effects of various shocks and government policies in affecting the costs, speed, and eventual outcome of restructuring are analyzed.

This paper develops a model of the process of reallocation of labor from the state sector to the private sector. When growth is exogenously determined, we show that in the initial stages of transition unemployment will rise over time. After a critical stage in the transition process, restructuring is accompanied by a decline in unemployment. When growth is endogenously determined, and human capital is acquired by learning-by-doing, we show that whether restructuring eventually occurs is determined by the level of human capital in the private sector and the rate of unemployment. The effects of various shocks and government policies in affecting the costs, speed, and eventual outcome of restructuring are analyzed.

Transition in Central and Eastern Europe has led to a U-shaped response of output: a sharp decline in output followed by recovery. Most of the countries of Central Europe seem now firmly on the upside; most of the countries of Eastern Europe are still close to the bottom of the U: an optimistic view is that they are now negotiating the turn. Olivier Blanchard, a distinguished economist who has worked on transition since its beginning, is one of the first to present a unified analysis of the process of transition. The U-shaped response of output, its causes and its implications, are the subject of this book. The text is split into four chapters. The first reviews the facts; the second focuses on the two basic mechanisms underlying transition: reallocation and restructuring; the third looks more closely at a number of issues, from the interactions between restructuring and privatization to the nature of the labour market in transition; the fourth chapter pulls the material together in an analytical model of transition. This model is then used to discuss policy issues, from the design of privatization to the role of fiscal policy in transition.

This volume is primarily concerned with the first key component of transition: restructuring—the changing behavior of firms and their complex interaction with the labor market, most particularly with unemployment. Chapter 1 gives an overview of firm behavior, restructuring, and the labor market in the transition. Chapter 2 focuses on the effect of output, ownership, and legal form on employment and wages in Central European firms. Chapter 3 explores employment and wage setting in three stages of Hungary's labor market transition. Chapter 4 considers enterprises in the Polish transition. Chapter 5 explains labor market flows in the midst of structural change. Chapter 6 explores the role of unemployment and restructuring in the transition, and chapter 7 presents a numerical model of transition. Emphasis is placed on the Czech and Slovak Republics, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

This title was first published in 2001: Exploring the relationship between the recession and labour supply in Kazakhstan during the 1990s, this volume develops an innovative new model of the transitional process in the context of the CIS. It departs from conventional economic models explaining the process of transition, transferring the focus of attention from labour demand to labour supply with a view to clarifying how the transitional recession has affected households and, in turn, how these changes modified the supply of labour. Paolo Verme examines how the dynamic of the reallocation of labour between state and private enterprises has been drastically altered by the growth of self-employment and also takes a much-needed look at the contribution of other factors, offering an original explanation of this most important economic phenomenon.

A proposal that the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not interchangeable -- can provide a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from the transactional environment and microeconomic restructuring. The core mechanism that drives economic growth in modern market economies is massive microeconomic restructuring and factor reallocation -- the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" by which new technologies replace the old. At the microeconomic level, restructuring is characterized by countless decisions to create and destroy production arrangements. The efficiency of these decisions depends in large part on the existence of sound institutions that provide a proper transactional environment. In this groundbreaking book, Ricardo Caballero proposes a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from limitations, especially institutional, that hinder these adjustments. Caballero argues that macroeconomic models need to be made more "structural" in a precise sense and can not be maintained on the assumption that decisions are fully flexible. What is needed, he proposes, is the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not freely interchangeable. Many of the major macroeconomic developments of recent decades, he argues, fit naturally into this perspective, including the transition problems of Eastern Europe, the heavy weight of labor regulations in Western Europe, the emerging market crises of the 1990s, the prolonged expansion of the U.S. economy, and Japan's stagnation following the collapse of its real estate bubble. After describing the basic arguments of the book and developing models to illustrate two different kinds of specificity (relationship specificity and technological specificity), Caballero analyzes a variety of aspects of inefficient restructuring and revisits perennial business cycle patterns such as the cyclical behavior of unemployment, investment, and wages. Finally, he looks at the endogenous response of political institutions and technology to opportunistic exploitation of relationship specificity. Economists working on macroeconomics, development, growth, labor, and productivity issues will find Caballero's conceptual framework applicable to phenomena in their fields.

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