Modelling labour reallocation during the Polish transition: a search-and-matching approach

An important feature of the reallocation process that took place in Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries was the decline in public sector employment due to the collapse of state-owned enterprises combined with an increase in private sector employment as new private firms emerged and old public companies were privatized. We propose a theoretical, parsimonious model which combines this feature with the standard search and matching model introduced by Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides. Using numerical simulation we show that faster transition (associated with faster restructuring of state-owned enterprises into more productive private firms) leads to a quicker convergence to the post-transitional equilibrium characterized by high GDP and high employment in the private sector. However, this comes at the cost of negative output growth and higher unemployment in the short run.