Causes and consequences of national variation in employment protection legislation in central and eastern Europe 2009-2011

Europe’s weak employment performance is often attributed to strict employment protection legislation (EPL). Several governments have therefore tried, albeit with varied success, to liberalise their employment laws in order to meet the Lisbon employment targets. This project examines such efforts in the EU’s new member states and accession countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC10). The aim is to understand not only the causes of national variation in EPL strictness and their consequences for employment, but also the dynamics of EPL reforms over time and conditions that make these politically difficult reforms viable. To this end, the project will develop a comparative database of EPL reforms documenting annual changes in employment protection since 1990, and political and economic factors associated with these reforms. To examine whether there may be more than one recipe for good/bad employment performance, statistical analysis and standard regression techniques will be combined with state-of-the-art qualitative methods in the form of crisp-set and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). By recognising that poor employment performance may not have the same causes in all countries, this analysis may provide evidence against one-size-fits-all policy recommendations, which often wrongly assume that what works in one country will work everywhere.

欧洲就业表现疲软常被归因于严苛的就业保护立法（Employment Protection Legislation, EPL）。为此，多国政府尝试放宽本国就业法律以达成里斯本就业目标，尽管改革成效参差不齐。
本研究项目聚焦欧盟中东欧新成员国与入盟候选国（CEEC10）的此类改革尝试，旨在厘清两大核心议题：一是各国就业保护立法严苛程度的差异及其对就业的影响，二是就业保护立法改革的时间演进动态，以及令这类政治阻力较大的改革得以推行的前提条件。
为此，本研究项目将构建就业保护立法改革比较数据库，记录1990年以来就业保护规则的年度变动情况，以及与这些改革相关的政治与经济影响因素。
为探究就业表现的优劣是否存在多元可行路径，本研究将结合标准回归技术等统计分析方法，与清晰集、模糊集定性比较分析（Qualitative Comparative Analysis, QCA）这两类前沿定性研究方法开展综合分析。
鉴于各国就业表现疲软的成因未必具有普遍性，本分析将为驳斥“一刀切”的政策建议提供实证支撑——这类建议往往错误地假定，在一国奏效的政策可在全球范围内通用。