MEASURING ADEQUACY OF FLEXICURITY CONCEPT FOR THE EU COUNTRIES USING FUZZY LOGIC APPROACH.

Implementation of the labour market flexicurity concept on national level can be seen as governmental project management issue in public administration - to manage a group of critical success factors that are to be achieved by enforcing four flexicurity principles: (a) flexible and reliable contractual arrangement through modern labour laws, collective agreements and work organisation; (b) comprehensive lifelong learning strategies; (c) effective active labour market policies; and (d) modern social security system that provides adequate income support, encourages employment and facilitates labour market mobility. There is no single indicator that measures the total flexicurity of the labour market. Furthermore, the value for society from the four flexicurity principles is perceived differently across EU countries in response to economic and political history and national traditions that have impact on public administration, as well as labour market regulations. Fuzzy Logic Approach is used when vague criteria must be incorporated into the analysis in order to measure the project effectiveness more precisely. By assuming that the labour market has the highest efficiency when concept of the flexicurity is enforced, the target of this research is to create a joint measurement of the labour market efficiency level in EU countries using Fuzzy Logic Approach (Ray S et.al., 2013) that consists of following steps: 1) selecting the critical success factors to be used for project effectiveness measurement; 2) define linguistic variables and their scales for the critical success factors as well as the effectiveness measurement scales; 3) define importance rating and performance rating scales for the critical success factors; 4) define fuzzy measurement index (FMI) for the project effectiveness; and 5) matching FMI with pre-defined linguistic levels of the project effectiveness measurement scale as defined in step 2. The outcome of this research provides public authorities with comparative analysis and information on measuring adequacy of the flexicurity concept in EU countries using the Fuzzy Logic Approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]