The European Employment Strategy: An Instrument of Convergence for the New Member States?

The European Employment Strategy (EES), introduced in 1997 to provide coordinated guidance of national employment policies, is touted for its capacity to reduce the unemployment rate and to stimulate growth in employment rates. Today it has been developed around three main objectives – full employment, improvement in quality and productivity at work, and reinforcement of social cohesion and inclusion – and has allowed convergence of national employment policies and certain characteristics of labour markets in the Europe of 15.
The new Member States have fully participated in its implementation only recently, but their preparation started before their accession to the Union. Nevertheless, their rapprochement with the path traced by the members that had adopted the EES eight years earlier is still not clearly perceptible: the divergences in the field of employment and labour markets have not decreased on the whole. In fact, they seem to have grown in certain areas.
This study analyses these divergences and asks what lies behind these results, in order to better understand the shortcomings of the EES and to identify avenues that could be taken. The idea is to take better advantage of this instrument in the Member States in Central Europe and in the Baltic States and to make it a more effective instrument for employment in the Europe of 25.
The analysis is based on five countries (Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia) that illustrate the major trends found in the new member countries on the whole: low rates of employment, strong regional disparities, large long-term unemployment and the development of the informal economy.