European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 75

European Policy Analysis

the reforms in the labor market. Indeed, the
employment rate of older workers in Slovenia
has been significantly below the European
levels and the EU employment guidelines,
especially for women. The generally low
employment of the older population is a
consequence of transition in Slovenia due to
the fact that early retirement was one of the
mild approaches to reducing the number of
employees in companies, which resulted in
a large number of relatively young retired
people. Older workers are also more prone
to becoming long-term unemployed.

The active labor market policies
(ALMP) that aimed to protect jobless
population from unemployment during
the analyzed period also couldn’t make
significant influence to the situation of older
people in the labor market. First, most of
the ALMP measures are not available for
the people beyond the age of retirement.
The analysis of the ALMP in the selected
countries (Feifs et al. 2013) also showed that
while applying ALMP measures in most of
the analyzed cases, the older unemployed
were included in the general group of the
vulnerable people. Unemployed people over
50 (Bulgaria, Poland) or over 55 years old
(Lithuania, Slovenia) were distinguished as a
vulnerable group at the labor market during
the analyzed period and were attributed to
the additional measures to support their
employment (such as vocational training,
support of job creation/entrepreneurship,
and others), though the wage subsidies and
training measures are the most popular
while integrating older people into the labor
market.

Above-mentioned active policies
should be considered under the context of
unfavorable economic situation due to the
2008 crisis. First, the most of the analyzed
Central and Eastern European countries
(except Poland) traditionally spend less on
ALMP (both in absolute and relative terms).

Second, the rapid growth of the number of
unemployed has put demand for the higher
public expenditure for activation measures.
However, countries such as Bulgaria and
Romania even cut the ALMP’s funding, and
scarce public resources during the crisis
didn’t allow considerably higher spending
on ALMPs in Lithuania. The changes of
ALMP funding reflected in the number
of participants. For example, the higher
spending on active measures allowed
Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, and Hungary to
increase the share of ALMP’s participants
(participants per 100 persons wanting to
work) during the crisis period. Anyway, the
accessibility of ALMP measures in selected
countries was still lower than that in old EU
countries.

Although the unemployed people
of the preretirement age had the right
for protection against unemployment
through participation in ALMP in selected
countries, the increased unemployment and
limited public resources for these measures
during the period 2008–2010 reduced their
opportunities to get such support in order to
get back to the labor market. It should also be
mentioned that the European Commission’s
and national governments’ focus on fighting
youth unem ployment also influenced the
national priorities toward participants of
ALMP. However, Barbier, Rogowski, and
Colomb (2015) stressed the different scale
of compliance with European demands in
different countries.

As the results from Czech
Republic show, probably the changes in
socioeconomic conditions didn’t create
enough pressure on such an institutional
domain as public employment services
as Fenger, van der Steen, and van der
Torre (2014) suggested. Thus, the policies
implemented by the public employment
services (a) lost institutional legitimacy
(if apply the concept of Sulitzeanu-Kenan
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