The Evolution of the Regulation of Labor in the USSR, the CIS and the Baltic States, 1985–2009

We have generated new data on Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic States - from 1985 - 2009. We adopted the OECD approach to quantifying regulations of the labor market and calculated detailed time series for each of the items used in version II of the OECD EPL Index. The data were obtained in a consistent fashion across countries and over time from a large array of national and international legal sources. To date the OECD data on employment protection remain not only the most widely used, but also perhaps the least criticized on methodological .