Education-to-Work Transitions in Former Communist Countries after 30-Plus Years of Transformation

Abstract

This paper reviews how young people’s education-to-work transitions have changed since 1989 in former communist countries that have subsequently become full members of the European Union (EU). The sudden collapse of the command economies led to an equally abrupt breakdown in earlier routes into working life. Subsequently, the new independent states have reconstructed their education and training, and their market economies have developed. They now exhibit similar variations in rates of youth unemployment, progression through higher education, and mixtures of academic and vocational secondary education as older EU member states. However, there are features that continue to set all ex-communist countries apart, irrespective of whether they have become full EU members. These are low local rates of pay and westward migration. Its new member states have joined the Southern countries in a European periphery. Yet, there may be sufficient winners in the European core and periphery to keep Europe united.

1. Introduction

Our aim is to present an updated account of how young people’s transitions from education to work have changed since 1989 in the 11 former communist countries that have become new European Union (EU) member states since 2004 (see

Table 1. European Union accession dates.

2004	Czech Republic (now Czechia), Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia
2007	Bulgaria, Romania
2013	Croatia

Source: European Commission, Directorate-General for Communication (2023).

). Where appropriate, we make comparisons with other former communist countries.

First, we ask whether education-to-work transitions in ex-communist member states retain features in common that set them apart from older EU member states. The distinctive features could be legacies from communism, experiences during their transitions into market economies, or even the countries’ pre-communist histories. Second, we use young people’s experiences as a lens to ask how eastward enlargement has changed the socio-economic geography of the European continent. In so doing, we are beginning to fill a gap in the literature that opened after EU funding dedicated to research in the ‘transition countries’ ended as the countries began to become full EU members.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, youth in former communist countries received sustained attention by East–West research partnerships that were supported from dedicated funds created by the European Commission. This research is reviewed thoroughly below. With hindsight, we can now see that this flurry of research was during a specific episode in the histories of the countries, which we describe as ‘the breakdown’. After 2004, when the countries began to join the EU as full members, this special funding ended. Researchers in the new member states could participate as full partners in projects that could be about young political activists, football cultures and other topics but did not specifically focus on features that set youth in former communist countries apart. Our account of developments since 2004 during the reconstruction of transitions in ex-communist member states heavily relies on data from EUROSTAT and other statistical databases. These data lack the richness and thick description of the studies that were conducted during the breakdown. Nevertheless, we can document general trends during the reconstruction of transitions: the re-nationalisation of education, a strong academic drift and greater diversity among the new member states. They are only set apart by the lower salaries that are available in their local labour markets. Young people must move West if they wish to earn Western salaries.

We discuss why the single market is not closing the salary gap and the implications for the socio-economic geography of the expanded EU. We then argue for a revival of ‘thick description’ research, focusing on East–West encounters when youth from the new member states move West and when they are employed by multi-nationals in their own countries.

2. Before Communism

When the Soviet bloc expanded into East-Central and South-East Europe in 1945, it encountered countries with generically European education systems (see Gulczyńska et al. 2023; Verdugo 2014). This was unlike the situation encountered by Russia’s Bolsheviks in 1917, who took over a country in which over 80 percent of the people were illiterate peasants.

Europe’s oldest education institutions are its universities. Some have histories of over a thousand years. The oldest schools were attached to universities and prepared pupils for them. The schools’ all-male pupils and students would be prepared for religious vocations. Other vocations were added during the Middle Ages: law, diplomacy and public service in the courts of Europe’s monarchs, princes and powerful landed magnates. Later, when countries started to urbanise and industrialise, new professions were added: medicine, science, technology, engineering, accountancy and others. These universities and the schools that prepared pupils for entry have always been Europe’s most prestigious education institutions, on account of the social backgrounds of their entrants and the adult lives towards which they headed.

By the 19th century, governments had created elementary schools for the rest of their populations. This education came first; thus, all subsequent schooling became ‘secondary’. Routes were created from elementary into the existing ‘academic’ secondary schools, and new schools of this type were created, but they were not for everyone. Progression was always conditional on a test of suitability. Alternative secondary schools offering technical and other vocational courses ran in parallel with older tracks.

The resultant multi-track secondary school systems are distinctively European, because America has done things differently (see Duncan and Goddard 2005). The USA has secondary schools and universities with 17th century origins. They were by-passed when states began to provide elementary schooling for all children from the 1850s and when state junior and senior high schools were created from the 1880s. The underlying assumption was that all those who completed elementary school would be able to enter secondary schools, and likewise, when state colleges began to be established, they would be able to enter once again from the 1880s onwards. Thus, American education operates a single track from which pupils exit at various ages. Those who survive into post-graduate schools are the winners in a long education contest in which over 80 percent remain in ‘the race’ up to the end of secondary education.

The American system has been a constant point of comparison with Europe’s multi-track systems. This contrast was made by Turner in 1960 when he compared the USA with England where, at that time, young people from age 11 were separated into those receiving an academic education in grammar schools (around a quarter of the age group, whose future success was thereby being ‘sponsored’) and the rest, who were given something different. The USA, by contrast, was presented by Turner as keeping all young people in a ‘contest’ for success for as long as possible. Graduating high school was a realistic goal for all young Americans who could then gain access to their states’ college systems. Following high school, each young person’s position in ‘the queue’ depended on the individual’s ability and effort (Turner 1960).

Europe’s multi-track regimes differ from country to country in the ages from which pupils are split into different tracks, the proportions on academic and other tracks (see Gangl 2001; Szydlik 2002), the titles of the various types of secondary schools and the qualifications awarded. There is a transatlantic divide, not only in education but also in their versions of capitalism, where America has a freer market while Europe is more highly regulated by governments and collective bargaining (Hall and Soskice 2001; Martinelli 2007). Europe also has stronger welfare states, albeit of different types (see Esping-Andersen 1989), which have been used to distinguish students’ experiences of higher education (Antonucci 2016) and unemployment (Hammer 2003), However, Europe’s researchers have more often compared the experiences and outcomes for students following academic (and the continent’s) vocational tracks (for example, Kogan et al. 2011; Noelke and Horn 2014).

The early roots of European education grew most strongly and densely in the Roman Catholic rather than the Orthodox parts of Europe. Elementary schooling for all children and the development of alternative vocational tracks in secondary education spread the earliest and most rapidly in the countries that were first to urbanise and industrialise—that is, the countries of Western Europe. This is important. East–West differences preceded communism (Kornai 2006).

When the Soviet ‘bloc’ was extended into East-Central and South-East Europe in 1945, it encountered countries with generically European education systems. There was no appropriate Soviet model that could be imposed wholesale. National communist politicians took charge of education in their countries and worked with what they inherited. Education retained country-specific features everywhere. Existing institutions retained their names. Academic secondary schools were most commonly known as high schools, lycees and gymnasiums. The qualifications that they awarded retained their titles, most often some version of baccalaureate, abitur, matura and licence.

Thereafter, the new communist authorities followed Soviet priorities (see Grant 1979; Matthews 1982; Shimoniak 1970). One was to ensure that all children received at least a full elementary education. Religion was removed, and Marxism entered curricula as a compulsory subject at all levels. In secondary and higher education, there was a strong tilt toward technical subjects and, wherever possible, toward students gaining experience in a workplace.

An initial and essential step towards communism was industrialisation, first in energy, steel and other basic commodities, then in manufactured products for distribution to domestic and international consumers. Economic planning linked one plant’s output to another plant’s supplies. One input was labour. Secondary school and higher education students would be given experience in the plants and occupations for which the plan had them destined. In practice, young people, advised by their parents, were as likely to obtain jobs informally (Reiter 2006). This was possible because sites and departments within them were always short of labour. Communism was an economy of shortages. However, the link between leaving education and employment became fragile as soon as markets replaced central planning. This was the source of the breakdown in transitions from education to work, with variations between countries in the severity of the breakdown and how long it lasted.

3. Breakdown

3.1. 1989

The transformations that began in 1989 were unplanned, expected by few and extraordinarily rapid. Modern transformations—interacting changes in politics and government, in economies and throughout societies, with the eventual outcomes unknown—usually extend over many decades. The industrial ‘revolutions’, which involved transformations of formerly rural economies, urbanisation, a demographic transition and the formation of new political movements, began in Britain in the mid-18th century, where it lasted until the end of the 19th century. By contrast, eight former communist countries had become multi-party democracies and capitalist market economies and were full members of the EU by 2004, just 15 years after 1989. Another three ex-communist countries were full EU members by 2013 (see Table 1, above).

The version of socialism IId in the USSR owed far more to the mind of Stalin, plus Russian history and culture, than anything that Karl Marx wrote or said. The Stalinist model could never nest comfortably on the different national cultures and institutions of the East-Central European countries onto which it was grafted after 1945. Yet in 1989, despite this manifest fragility, the collapse of communism was not regarded as imminent by most Western experts. They regarded the system as an alternative, if somewhat inferior, way of developing and managing an industrial society that was expected to endure for many more years (for example, on Poland see Kolankiewicz and Lewis 1988).

In Poland, Solidarity’s most optimistic hope in 1989 was that, following the elections on 4 June, it would share power with the communist parties. Solidarity won all but one of the seats that were up for election. People waited to see what would happen. Soviet tanks did not roll into Warsaw. Poland had a post-communist government, and the fuse was lit. The people started to mobilise in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. By mid-1990, all these countries had post-communist governments. Germans on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’ aimed for unification. By the end of 1990, this happened. The Federal Republic had swallowed its smaller neighbour.

3.2. The ‘Wild East’

A consequence of the rapid and unexpected collapse of communism was that new national governments entered office without a plan for the following day. The EU was unprepared. It had no plan to implement. The revolutions in East-Central Europe aimed to free the countries from communist ideology and move quickly towards democratic elections, but what next? The revolutions were certainly not aimed towards selling state assets or dismantling welfare provisions (European Union Project 2005). Despite this, governments that were desperately short of funds permitted ‘experiments’ with privatised welfare ‘reforms’, which were thereby being trialled and monitored by the World Bank (Deacon and Hulse 1997).

There was an instant economic shock in all the countries with their withdrawal from the planning that had linked supplies and output from plants within and between the socialist countries. Plants lost various combinations of supplies and customers, with ‘domino effects’ throughout the economies. Whether the plants survived depended on the ingenuity and enterprise of local managers and local government officials in arranging new deals between suppliers and customers. Salaries were sometimes unpaid for months. Household incomes shrank by up to 40 percent (Simai 2006).

Neo-liberal Western economists advocated ‘creative destruction’ as a shock-therapy policy. Where applied, as in Russia after 1991, the shock was gale force. The therapy was difficult to detect (Gerber and Hout 1998). Throughout the 1990s, whatever the country, there was far more evidence of the collapse of the old system than any new ‘green shoots’. Capitals may have recovered quickly, but, not far from the centres of capitals and other major cities, the residents’ experiences of post-communism were very different (see Kurakbaev 2001).

State officials who had been appointed under the old system found their authority waning. Even the police was de-legitimised. In some places, businesses found it necessary to arrange their own protection. Sometimes this could be bought from official police who became partly official, partly entrepreneurial. Unofficial payments including ‘bribe taxes’ (see Earle 2000) became necessary to ensure that official forms were processed and that documents were stamped. In Russia, ‘mafia’ gangs fought for the control of city territories, industrial sites and residential blocks, and this launched a debate about whether the country was becoming a mafia state (see Varese 2001).

For young people who were approaching the end of their education, a major change was that responsibility for hiring and finding jobs was privatised. Youth unemployment became a new major issue (Roberts et al. 1997b). The conventional links between jobs, education and family backgrounds were broken. What mattered in the 1990s were ‘connections’, new skills in ICT, and foreign (Western) languages. Most young people were optimistic about their own if not their countries’ futures. They felt that they were in charge of their own lives (Roberts and Fagan 1998, 1999). The good news for recent labour market entrants was that firms were keen to employ fresh young people in preference to staff whose work habits had been formed under the old system (Roberts et al. 1997a).

There were signs of socio-economic breakdown everywhere. In parts of Russia (and not only in Russia) ‘zombie’ vocational schools continued to train young people for non-existent jobs (Walker 2007). In Ukraine, graduate job seekers could find themselves being asked for money or sex if they wanted their applications to be processed (Round et al. 2008). A sign of acute social breakdown was hundreds of abandoned children living on the streets of cities such as Moscow (Stephenson 2001) and Bucharest (Save the Children Romania 1998).

The futures that the old system had laid out for those leaving education were swept away, but most young people welcomed their new freedoms (Roberts and Jung 1995). Many new opportunities were expected to open. When visa-free travel into the European Union became possible from candidate countries, young people were able to obtain a taste of life in the West by simply boarding a bus and presenting a passport. Young East Europeans became the continent’s most enthusiastic supporters of ‘European integration’ (Niznik and Skotnicka-Illasiewicz 1992). Increasingly, new cohorts of young people started to experience the new challenges and freedoms as ‘just normal’ rather than sources of excitement or complaint (Markowitz 2000).

For those choosing to stay at home or unable to migrate in the 1990s, business was the new glamour career, a route to wealth and status. In practice, business usually meant trading, buying and selling on pavements, from street kiosks or a shop. More ambitiously and profitably, trading could be by car or lorry, preferably across national borders (Roberts et al. 1998). Most of the start-ups were swept away when shopkeepers had casual traders cleared from pavements and when McDonald’s and other Western brands opened and easily won the battle for customers. Business was a risky career for recent school-leavers. For many, it was ‘survival self-employment’, enforced by a shortage of proper jobs (Roberts et al. 2000). Most of those in employment were working at jobs which, they insisted, were not their true professions: historians who were working in street kiosks; international journalists (by education) were working for travel agents. Mere ‘survival’ could be experienced and presented as success in the wild 1990s (Roberts et al. 2000).

3.3. Creating Capitalism

The Wild East period was brief in countries that became candidates for European Union membership and adopted European commercial laws, as countries that explored answers to the question, ‘How to create capitalism in states where no-one has any (legally acquired) capital?’ (Eyal et al. 1998). Governments could sell state assets to foreigners. They could be sold in whole or in part, thereby creating new (in the countries) forms of recombinant property (Stark 1996). State assets could be disposed of in ‘honey deals’ with members, or members of the families, of old or new political elites (Stoica 2004). Multi-national companies began establishing branches of their restaurant and hotel chains, as well as banks and motor assembly plants, in Europe’s new market economies. Existing businesses could be given to employees, or members of the public, in ‘voucher privatisations’. These vouchers usually proved worthless until an entrepreneur bought them cheaply, established a controlling interest and could then restructure a company, reduce the payroll and make the enterprise profitable. Managements who had kept their sites alive and profitable could obtain loans for management buy-outs. Meanwhile, the new information and communication technologies were creating new opportunities for tech-savvy young people to become self-employed and then develop small and medium-sized companies.

3.4. Rebuilding Classes

During the Wild East episode of the 1990s, there was a debate about whether the new market economies were creating new middle classes or whether the populations had polarised into a small number of ‘new rich’ and impoverished masses. Some writers claimed that, whenever people tried to reach it, the middle class proved to be a mirage. Supposedly middle-class jobs no longer paid salaries that would support a middle-class lifestyle (Kivenen 1998; Tilkidjiev 1996). This may have been true briefly, but, by the turn of the century, emerging middle classes had gained high visibility in the capitals and in other major cities. They were the successfully self-employed owners of small and medium-sized companies and the salaried staff of multinational corporations. Also, governments had become more effective tax collectors and were receiving funds from the European Union. Public sector employment expanded and became better paid.

The growth in personal incomes that commenced in the 1990s as East-Central Europe’s economies began to recover mainly went to the new middle classes (Roberts and Fagan 1999; Roberts et al. 2008; Tilkidjiev 2004). New class structures were being created from the top (Roberts and Pollock 2009). Meanwhile, the old intelligentsia class (Kotchetkova 2004; Roberts et al. 2005) and the working class (Stenning 2005) were suffering socio-cultural annihilation. The countries had ceased to be workers’ states. The middle class took over as the class of aspiration.

4. Reconstruction of Young People’s Transitions

4.1. Re-Nationalisation

Once market economies with rules were successfully underway, national governments could begin reforming education in ways that offered new ‘bridges’ into work. It was easy to strip communist features, and there was no European Union template that governments had to adopt; education was left to national governments. Marxism left; religion returned. The Russian language was quickly replaced by Western foreign languages. History and literature foregrounded the relevant country. Institutions retained titles and awarded qualifications with histories that preceded and had been retained during communism.

4.2. Academic Drift: The Degree Generation

In the 1990s, it appeared that vocational routes would continue as in the past in the new market economies. Researchers found that, just as in the West (Shavit and Muller 2000), vocational routes in East-Central Europe acted as both diversions (from top jobs) and safety-nets (against risks of unemployment) (Kogan et al. 2011; de Lange et al. 2014; Shavit and Muller 1998). However, these researchers also found that the proportions of young people following vocational routes were falling, and employers were offering less support in equipment, cash and work experience for the schools that remained (Noelke and Horn 2014).

The speed and scale of the collapse of vocational routes in some countries has been astonishing. By 2020, Romania’s young people who were attending vocational schools were mainly from rural areas or small towns, commuting to the nearest vocational schools in cities where the specialties did not resemble the pupils’ career intentions or prospects (Pantea 2020). Difficulties in sustaining vocational routes soon became evident in the territory of the former GDR, where young people were reluctant to be side-tracked. Private sector employers were unwilling to invest in training young people who they might be unable to employ on the completion of their apprenticeships, and who, in any case, might leave to seek work elsewhere, like in the original Federal Republic (Evans et al. 2000).

Student enrolments in higher education have risen across Europe in countries that have joined the EU and in those that remain outside. The numbers achieving entry qualifications in upper secondary education have risen everywhere, and the doors to universities have been opened to students with alternative (vocational) qualifications. Many students drop out without any qualifications or try to remain perpetual students, ‘lost in transition’ (De Young 2011).

Secondary school students now treat a university degree as the minimum qualification for obtaining any decent job (Mimina and Pavlenko 2022). ‘Decent’ means a permanent contract, prospects of career progression and a salary that will support an adult lifestyle. Nevertheless, ‘degree generation’ is already well established in Southern Europe, where university qualification increases risks of unemployment, as graduates wait for jobs that they regard as commensurate with their qualifications (Albert et al. 2023; Bernadi 2003; Cairns et al. 2014). There can be longer-term costs in stepping down the labour market into a job for which a person feels over-qualified or when taking a job where there is a mismatch with the individual’s qualifications and capabilities (see Zudina 2022).

A degree may be essential to be considered not only for ‘top jobs’ but also for any decent job, while guaranteeing neither. This is the context in which questions are being asked throughout Europe, regarding whether countries are producing too many university graduates. Many graduates now find initial employment in an expanding precariat class (Standing 2011). The ‘gig economy’ includes delivery drivers and also ‘platform’ workers with digital skills who bid for bundles of work of various complexity and sizes (Purcell and Brook 2022).

4.3. Diversification

The education systems in East-Central and South-East Europe varied prior to and remained different under communism, and they have subsequently become more diverse as countries have resumed national histories. However, this diversity has remained within the European multi-track model.

Participation rates in higher education have been rising globally since before and throughout the years during which Europe’s ex-communist countries have been transforming. The whole of Europe has been part of this global trend. Youth transitions in the EU’s new member states have become more diverse while being part of these trends. There are large differences in the proportions of young people completing higher education. In 2021, over 50 percent of 25–34-year-old people in Lithuania had tertiary qualifications but less than 30 percent had the same in Romania. The range was wider among the older EU members: over 60 percent in Luxembourg and Ireland but under 30 percent in Italy (see

Table 2. Percentages of populations aged 25–34 with tertiary educational attainment (ISCED 5–8), 2021.

%	Country
60% and over	Luxembourg, Ireland
50–59%	Cyprus, Lithuania, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Switzerland
40–49%	Sweden, Denmark, Spain. Slovenia, Portugal, Latvia, Greece, Estonia, Malta, Austria, Poland, Finland, Iceland
30–39%	Slovakia, Germany. Croatia, Czechia, Bulgaria, Hungary
20–29%	Italy, Romania

(Eurostat 2022).

). The new member states do not form a distinct bunch but are spread throughout a range of variation among older EU members.

The same applies to the proportions of the 16–18 age group taking specialised courses rather than general education (CEDEFOP 2021). Europe retains its distinction as a multi-track continent, but unless tracks can lead to higher education, they easily become residual routes to nowhere in particular, recruiting young people who do not meet the standards required for entry to other tracks. The ‘classical’ European vocational tracks were built in and for industrial societies, and these prepared young people for occupations in which they were expected and could expect to spend their working lives.

If transitions from education to work are ‘different’ in all the new market economies, this is not in terms of education participation rates, courses taken towards the end of school education, levels of achievement or difficulties in finding jobs (see below) so much as the character of the jobs towards which they can head while they remain at home.

4.4. Labour Markets

According to the evidence presented so far, education-to-work transitions in the new market economies do not set them apart from those of old Western Europe. Rates of youth unemployment in ex-communist countries spread fairly evenly from those close to the top to those close to the bottom in the expanded EU.

Reconstruction does not mean that transitions now work satisfactorily for either employers or young people in former communist countries. Unemployment rates are one indicator of the difficulties that young people face. There are large differences in the youth unemployment rates in both pre- and post-2004 EU member states. In January 2022, the post-communist member state with the lowest youth unemployment was Czechia (7 percent), and the highest rate was in Romania (21 percent). There was a wider range among older EU members from 6 percent in Germany to 31 percent in Greece (Eurostat 2022). The ex-communist EU members have joined a European ‘family’ of diverse education-to-work transitions (see

Table 3. Youth (16–24-year-olds) unemployment rates in percentages, seasonally adjusted, January 2022.

Country	%	Country	%
Greece	31	Luxembourg	13
Spain	29	Ireland	13
Italy	25	Hungary	12
Sweden	23	Lithuania	12
Portugal	23	Latvia	11
Romania	21	Poland	11
Slovakia	21	Denmark	10
Estonia	18	Slovenia	10
Croatia	17	Austria	9
Cyprus	17	Malta	9
Belgium	16	Netherlands	8
Finland	16	Czechia	7
Bulgaria	15	Germany	6
France	15

(Eurostat 2022), European Labour Force Survey.

).

4.5. Salaries

In the early 2020s, average gross monthly pay rates were much lower in all the former communist EU member states than in Northern and West-Central Europe (see

Table 4. Average gross monthly salary ranges in Europe, 2020/21/22.

	Actual EUR	PPP EUR
West-Central and Northern Europe (excluding Switzerland)	3310–6173	2955–4361
South	1355–2479	2156–3141
Ex-communist member states	885–2002	1670–2643
Balkan candidates	763–890	1621–2023

Source: https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-monthly-salary-european-union-2022, accessed on 18 December 2023.

). This table divides countries into a West-Central and Northern group, Southern EU states, ex-communist members and the Balkan countries that are still candidates. In the early 2020s, average monthly salaries in the new East-Central and South-East member states ranged from EUR 885 in Bulgaria to EUR 2022 in Slovakia. In the Northern and West-Central countries, it was from EUR 3310 in France to EUR 6173 in Denmark. The ranges in East-Central and South-East Europe member states overlapped considerably with Southern EU members: EUR 1335 in Greece to EUR 2479 in Italy.

These differences within a single market are surprisingly wide. In the USA, average salaries are 2.24 times higher in the top state (New York) compared to the state where salaries are the lowest (Mississippi) (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). In the EU, the ratio is 7.0.

Young people in Eastern Europe have joined those in the South. If they want Western rates of pay, then they will most likely need to migrate. The scale of westward flows of people, mainly young adults, has serious demographic consequences in Eastern Europe. Between 2000 and 2015, outward migrants amounted to a third of Romania’s economically active population (Ban 2019; Tarlea and Freyberg-Inan 2018). Much of this movement is pendulum migration, but every wave of returners is balanced by similar numbers moving out. Migrants include those who might be considered ‘brain drain’ or ‘skills drain’. The choice that higher education graduates face may be a job at home that matches their qualifications or higher pay in a non-skilled job in the West. They face a ‘migrant penalty’ in high-salary countries: greater difficulty than locals in finding a job with as close a match to their qualifications and an equal salary (Kogan and Schabinger 2023). Despite this penalty, small towns and villages have been stripped of young adults throughout former communist Europe, with children left in the care of their grandparents (Save the Children Romania 2021).

5. Europe United?

We can reject the argument of ‘deniers’ who point out that East–West pay differences narrow considerably when moderated for purchasing power parity (PPP) (see Table 4). This is because, when salaries are low, so are the costs to consumers of locally produced goods and services. However, if raw data exaggerate the poverty of the EU’s new East, PPP is insensitive to what it means when a European population becomes better off. Internationally traded goods and services, such as low-cost flights, Japanese cars and iPhones, to name a few, are sold at similar prices in all countries and are far more likely to feature in Western household budgets than in the East. In any case, adjusting for purchasing power parity still leaves the highest salary country among the ex-communist states lagging behind the country from the West-Central and Northern group with the lowest average salary.

We can reject the possibility that crude East–West differences in prices and pay reflect differences in composition or mixes of employment in different industries, with the East having larger shares of employment in low-paid agricultural jobs, for example. Workers in car assembly plants in the East are paid far less than those doing similar jobs in Germany, Belgium and France (Mihaly 2021).

We can also reject the possibility that lower incomes in the East might be attributable to human capital deficits. Most of the countries may have fewer graduates in their workforces than Western countries do (see Table 2), but, even so, there are debates within these countries about the very high number of degrees that do not match skill or competence requirements (Brown et al. 2020).

We also reject ‘dependent market economies’ as a plausible explanation of the East–West salary gap. As noted earlier, just two varieties of Western capitalism were formerly recognised: the liberal American and the regulated European types (Hall and Soskice 2001). Noelke and Vliegenthart (2009) proposed a third type: the dependent market economy. These are said to have been created in Eastern Europe where foreign investment has been used extensively to kick-start capitalism. Foreign ownership is said to depress overall rates of pay. First, this is because lower-paid, less skilled jobs are the ones mainly exported, while higher-paid corporate management and professional posts remain home-based. Second, in so far as profits flow back home, these are available there to support top executive salaries and to be taxed, thereby supporting public sector services and jobs in the West. The problem with this theory is simply that the facts do not fit. There is too much overlap in the proportions of the private sector economies in old and new EU member states that are foreign owned: 16 percent to 45 percent in West-Central and Northern Europe, and 23 percent to 48 percent in new ex-communist member states (Our World in Data 2019)

There is just one example of a former communist country escaping the low pay trap. This is the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). In 1991, average pay in the former GDR was 57 percent of the West German average. By 2018, the gap had closed to 85 percent. This required annual transfers from the Federal German budget equal to a quarter of the GDP in former GDR territories (Enenkel and Rosel 2022). European Union inter-national ‘solidarity’ transfers to its post-2004 member states have not matched Germany’s intra-national generosity. Indeed, EU Youth Guarantees tend to reinforce the anchorage of young people in depressed local labour markets (see Emmanouil et al. 2023).

6. Conclusions

We can now answer the questions with which this paper opened. First, are education-to-work transitions different in the EU’s new East? Our updated account of young people’s transitions in the EU’s new ex-communist member states shows that, following a common experience of ‘breakdowns’ of different lengths and severities, the countries have become more diverse. Each has become more nationally distinctive, with wide variations in the proportions of young people following ‘general’ and more specialised courses in upper secondary education, progressing through higher education into graduate labour markets and in rates of youth unemployment. All the countries have been part of an ‘academic drift’ toward secondary courses that can then lead to entering higher education. However, in these ways, all the differences among ex-communist countries exist in a range of variation among older EU member states. The new member states have joined a European family of diverse multi-track education-to-work transitions. The East-Central and South-East member states form a distinct bunch, only on account of the lower salaries that are available locally compared with those that await Northern and West-Central European youth. Kornai (2006) noted that this conclusion to ‘the transition’ from candidates to full EU member states will disappoint many, but the ‘Mediterraneanisation’ predicted by Roberts (1999) has happened.

Second, the outcome of the countries’ transitions to full EU member states has altered the socio-economic geography of the continent. Young people in Europe’s new East share much in common with their counterparts in Southern countries. Together, the Southern, South-East and East-Central member states form an arch surrounding the Northern and West-Central European core. The peripheral arch starts in Portugal and continues through Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, plus the adjacent state of Czechia.

However, there have been winners in the core and periphery. Businesses can produce in a low-cost East, then distribute westward and sell at Western prices. Their lower costs are the East’s main competitive advantage. Young people from the East can earn and save in the West, then spend at home where their Euros buy more. These are among the threads that might keep the expanded European Union united.

This points to a route forward for European youth research. The strengths and weaknesses of threads that may unite or break labour developments need to be tested in a revival of ‘thick description research’, focusing on direct encounters when youth from the East move West, and when employed by multi-nationals in their home countries.