Winners and losers in transition :
            returns to education, experience, and gender in Slovenia
The authors identify winners and losers
            in Slovenia's economic transition by tracing changes in
            returns to education, experience, and gender and changes in
            wage inequality from 1987 to 1991.  They find the following.
            Relative wages and employment rose for the most educated and
            fell for the least educated, in all industries.  Relative
            wages and employment rose with years of work experience
            until pensionable age.  At pensionable age, relative wages
            increased very rapidly and relative employment was greatly
            reduced.  Using pension policies to encourage early
            retirement drastically reduced the supply of very
            experienced workers.  Either the policy caused firms to bid
            up wages for workers of pensionable age to keep them from
            retiring, or it caused a selection process in which only the
            highest-paid workers remained in the workforce.  Regardless,
            the pension policy has proved to be costly, and early
            retirements did not make room for the youngest workers but
            for those just under pensionable age.  Women gained relative
            to men in both wages and employment primarily because they
            occupy education and industry groups less adversely affected
            by the transition, not because of economywide reductions in
            discrimination against women.  Increasing returns to
            education and experience contributed to wage inequality, but
            the variance in wages also increased for individuals with
            identical skills.   Big changes in relative wages should
            signal future reallocation of labor toward more productive,
            higher-paying sectors.  Setting minimum wages, fixing ranges
            of pay, and indexing wages to inflation did not prevent
            increases in wage variation from occuring.  Wage minimums
            did not appear to have an effect, presumably because
            inflation reduced real minimum wages so quickly that most
            workers were paid above the minimums.  In Slovenia, policy
            changes are reflected in labor market outcomes.  Disabling
            the tax-transfer policy from relatively profitable to
            relatively unprofitable firms and eliminating worker
            referendums on wage scales removed mechanisms that tended to
            compress wage variation.  Greater demand for skilled workers
            also reflected both the economywide need to cope with
            uncertainty and such industry-specific factors as reduced
            labor demand, especially in less skill-intensive industries.
            The results in Slovenia contrast sharply with those in
            eastern Germany.  Eastern German workers have had decreasing
            returns to education and experience.  But it is not clear
            how relevant the eastern German experience is to other
            transitional economies because of western Germany's
            efforts to alleviate problems.  More similar to the
            authors' findings are the results of Flanagan (1993) on
            the Czech Republic, which show increasing returns to
            education but decreasing returns to experience. In some
            respects, Slovenia is atypical because it is richer and more
            western in orientation than other transitional economies.
            However, economies could learn from the experience in
            Slovenia because Slovenia also had social ownership, full
            employment coupled with substantial hidden unemployment, and
            an egalitarian wage structure.  And Slovenia has introduced
            labor market reform and experienced social dislocations
            similar to those in other transitional European economies.