My paper presents the labour market situation, in particular the employment, unemployment trends by the Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries, which are joined the European Union in 2004 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia). The group of these countries is called, somewhat imprecisely in geographical terms, Central Eastern European region.

A general feature of the ex-socialist countries of the region is that they inherited a relatively developed non-market sector from the era of state-owned economy. My hypothesis states that the labour market position of the Central-Eastern European transitional countries are different by the employment. According to my hypothesis, the economic revitalizing effects of the employment policy cannot be experienced so strong in the underdeveloped regions and only temporary results can be achieved in the social area, because of the short-term focus. Economic and social reforms in the Central-Eastern European economies have induced important output changes since 1989 (change of socialist regime). According to Kornai, open unemployment was unknown in socialism, the employment rate was very high; each worker could feel his or her job safe. Rather an inverse disequilibrium was typical. The socialist economy resulted in chronic shortage, one manifestation of which was–at least in the relatively more developed and industrialised Central Eastern countries–the chronic unemployment. This paper focuses on the major forms of labour market indicators and examines their significance in the Central-Eastern European transitional countries.