Is there Path Dependence for Romania’s Labor Market? Relevance and Impact

The Romanian labor market had a difficult “maturation” process reflected in the fluidity and instability shown by many of the relevant economic and social institutions during the transition period. Moreover, both the transition period, and the post-transition one have augmented several issues on this market, from among which we mention: labor force migration associated with accelerated demographic ageing; mismatch between educational supply and labor market demand; increasingly marked and hard to remedy disparities between the regions of development; excessive urban-urban, urban-rural, rural-rural polarization, and wider gaps between the various groups of population represented or representative for the labor market in Romania. It is obvious that for the labor market and its outcomes the question about the existence or non-existence of path dependency becomes relevant, in order to identify some objectives and tools that are efficient from a labor market perspective in diminishing the existing types of disjunctions and speeding-up the process in view of achieving the convergence and cohesion objectives at European level. The paper aims to realize a general empirical analysis based on the data provided by various national and European statistics regarding the evolution registered by the main wage, unemployment and active labor market policies as they all provide for useful and relevant information about the relevance and impact of path dependence, but also for possible path ‘divergence’, ‘disengagement’ or ‘shift’, particularly for the crisis and post-crisis period.