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.

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