Abstract
strengthen their international competitiveness. This was linked to the implementation of institutional and economic reforms, significant technological changes and improvements in the quality of human capital, as well as fiscal stabilisation policies. These changes affected their situation in the labour market.
 Purpose of the article: The aim of the study is to assess changes in the situation in the labour market in the EU with particular emphasis on the post-communist countries in the period 2002? 2019.
 Methods: The situation of countries in the European labour market was estimated using the TOPSIS method. A similarity matrix of changes in the composite variable for each country was then constructed using the Dynamic Time Warping method. On its basis, homogeneous clusters of countries were determined using the Ward?s method.
 Findings & value added: Four homogenous clusters of countries were formed. The post-communist ones belonged to two groups. In one, there were two countries ? Croatia and Slovakia. The rest of the post-communist countries were in a large cluster, which also included Germany, Malta, Finland, Portugal, France and Belgium. Changes of the situation in the post-communist countries in this group improved very much during the analysed period (this was particularly evident for Czechia, Estonia and Poland). It is interesting to investigate whether the reaction of labour markets to changes in the global economic situation in post-communist countries is similar to that in the old EU countries. The similarity of changes can be measured using the DTW method. There is an empirical research gap in this respect. Therefore, the added value is the use of this method in assessing similarities of changes in the labour market situation in post-communist countries in comparison to the Western European ones.
Highlights
The process of transition from the centrally planned economy into the market one started in Europe in late 1980s
The range between the best and the worst values of variables is in some cases very high. This shows that there is a wide variation in the analysed indicators between the analysed countries. Such situation occurs in the case of the unemployment rate
In the case of the unemployment rate among young people, the worst value is over 12.5 times higher than the best one
Summary
The process of transition from the centrally planned economy into the market one started in Europe in late 1980s. Since 2004, until 2013, eleven of them joined the European Union. Two countries (Bulgaria and Romania) joined the EU in 2007 and the last one — Croatia — in 2013. Many branches of the economy collapsed or deteriorated (large parts of heavy industries, mining, shipbuilding or textile industries). It caused changes in employment levels and forms. Non-existent, nonstandard forms of employment (self-employment, or part-time employment) became more prominent. They are much more beneficial for the employer than for the employee, they helped improving the parameters of the labour market, such as decrease of the unemployment rate (Zieliński, 2020)
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