New Jobs, Worklessness and Households in Poland

JEL Classification J3, J6, P5

Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth

Department of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland and

Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London.


Abstract

Has the new Polish labour market created opportunities for all or has the distribution of work been split unequally across household types? Are low unemployment outflows caused by increased congestion from employed job seekers or by low entry wages relative to benefit levels? Using data from waves of the Polish Labour Force Survey beginning in May 1992, we document the type of new jobs created and analyse the household groups most likely to benefit from the transformation process in order to assess the likely distributional consequences of the employment generation process.


Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Tito Boeri for helpful comments and to GUS for providing the data within the PHARE ACE project No. 94-0578-R. Financial support from this project is also gratefully acknowledged. The usual caveat applies.