The Romanian Flexicurity – A Response to the European Labour Market Needs

The purpose of the paper is to assess the place of Romania in the context of the main flexicurity models identified at European level and to make a taxonomy of the EU countries through a cluster-type analysis, based on correlations between essential factors, namely: between F1 (advanced forms of internal flexibility and security) and F2 (external flexibility), as well as between F1 (advanced forms of internal flexibility and security) and F3 (basic forms of functional flexibility).
The novelty of the analysis we performed consists in including Romania in the European Flexicurity Models2. One of the most comprehensive analyses of the flexicurity models was performed by the European Commission in ‘Employment in Europe 2007’ on a group of 22 member states, which does not include Romania. The present analysis covers the EU27 countries, minus Luxembourg, Cyprus and Malta (a total of 24 EU countries), for assessing the place of Romania in the main flexicurity models identified at European level. In addition, the analysis includes two non-EU members, namely Switzerland and Norway.
The results indicate that within the European flexicurity models Romania falls into the large group of Central and Eastern European Model, with a low level of security and internal and functional flexibility.

Keywords: flexicurity, employment security, social security, labour market flexibility, internal flexibility, external flexibility, functional flexibility, flexicurity models
JEL Classification: J00, J20, J40, J50