Employment structure by sector in Central and Eastern Europe 1900-2000

Over the course of the 20^th century, the structure of the labor forces in Central and Eastern Europe changed drastically. In 1900, almost 70 percent of the workforce in Hungary, one of the more industrialized regions in Central and Eastern Europe at the time, still worked in agriculture; in Russia, the largest economic power in the region, it was roughly three-quarters. Russia then began to industrialize following the revolution in 1917, as too did Central European countries, but it was not until after the Second World War when this would take off in the Balkans after the adoption of socialist economic structures.

By the mid-1900s, there was a fairly broad spread of the workforce between the three major sectors of the economy. At the end of the century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe, over half of the workforce in Eastern Europe employed in the service sector, while agricultural industries then employed fewer than one fifth. Although this was a substantial decrease since the beginning of the century, it was still roughly double the share of the workforce employed in agriculture in Southern Europe, and six times larger than that of Western Europe.