Market transition in Central and Eastern Europe triggered many new socioeconomic developments. One of them was the appearance of open unemployment vastly different from that noted in most developed economies around the world. As a result, the term “transformation unemployment” began to be used in literature on the subject. The authors of the article analyze the trend from a theoretical point of view and then follow up with an empirical study of unemployment. They present changes in the labor force and GDP in several groups of countries: Central Europe (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) plus Slovenia; Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and Balkan countries (former Yugoslav states except Slovenia as well as Albania, Bulgaria and Romania). The authors offer a statistical analysis of GDP growth and unemployment in individual groups of countries. In the final part of the article, the most important conclusions are summed up. These include the fact that the analyzed groups of countries display major differences in unemployment rates, along with changes in employment figures and labor productivity. Moreover, in most these countries, GDP growth has had a limited effect on unemployment. The only exception is Central Europe, though the European members of the Commonwealth of Independent States and transition economies in the Balkans also stand out positively.