Growth models and female labor in post-socialist Eastern Europe

Eastern European women had the highest labor force participation in the world during socialism. With the onset of capitalism, significant shares of women permanently exited the labor market in some countries, while they stayed economically active in others. This article shows that the countries’ different capitalist growth models—defined as strategic national approaches to growth stimulation and job creation—can explain this divergence. Nonlinear interactions between national growth models and structuring of female labor are theoretically abstracted in this article, following which they are tested empirically using a statistical dataset that covers twelve Eastern European countries during the period 1997–2015.