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Leading international economists examine the different patterns and long-term trends behind persistent unemployment across Western Europe in light of recent developments in labor market theory. Structural unemployment, or persistently high levels of unemployment that do not follow the ups and downs of a typical business cycle, varies significantly across industrialized countries. In this CESifo volume, leading labor economists analyze the widely diverging patterns of long-term unemployment across Western Europe. Drawing on recent developments in labor market theory and macroeconomics to explain the emergence and persistence of unemployment, the studies look for fundamental explanations and common patterns that might lead to policy solutions.The two opening chapters offer overviews of the problem: European labor market expert Stephen Nickell highlights the unemployment situation in the "Big Four" continental European states of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and American economist Edmund S. Phelps focuses on new theoretical approaches that examine institutional factors influencing unemployment in a given country. Following these introductory essays, prominent economists consider the experiences of their home countries, in chapters on Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. By taking advantage of the richness of research conducted at a national level and making the work accessible to an international audience, this volume contributes to a new understanding of structural unemployment and how it can be overcome through labor market reforms and other economic policy measures. Contributors Torben Andersen, Samuel Bentolila, Norbert Berthold, Guiseppe Bertola, Rainer Fehn, Pietro Garibaldi, Bertil Holmlund, Juan F. Jimeno, Erkki Koskela, Stephen J. Nickell, Jan C. van Ours, Edmund S. Phelps, Jean Pisany-Ferry, Christopher Pissarides, Roope Uusitalo, Brendan Walsh, Martin Werding
This comprehensive and instructive study examines the relative success or failure of government policies in preventing and alleviating unemployment. Choosing two contrasting cases—West Germany and the United States—Thomas Janoski probes the causes and consequences of two very different orientations toward labor market policy. In West Germany, labor, employers, and government cooperate in the running of a powerful and effective employment service. In the United States, by contrast, one finds little state involvement, organizational confusion, a long history of poor funding, and legislative resistance to intervention in the labor market. In the author's mind, these inadequate policies have had deleterious consequences for the American labor force. Whereas a skilled and flexible labor force exists in West Germany, Americans are poorly trained and barely assisted in finding jobs and training. To remedy this situation Janoski puts forth bold and useful policy recommendations, including the creation of a new organization to operate in national labor markets, the development of technical training programs in high schools, and the creation of a youth service to prevent teenage crime. The Political Economy of Unemployment offers a trenchant examination of how modern industrialized nations deal with the vicissitudes of the economy and how they might develop and implement more effective labor market policies. Meticulously researched, it is an important contribution that policymakers and social scientists will find provocative and useful. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
This volume examines the impact that the financing and administration systems of labor market policy have on the design of national policies concerning the unemployed. The authors investigated labor market policy in six countries--Austria, France, Federal Republic of Germany. Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States--and determined that the distribution of responsibility for labor market programs, the financing of these programs, and the procedures for determining issues and expenditures differ markedly from country to country. The authors explore how the same economic causes--price changes, technological rationalization, new products--can have very different labor market effects because of institutional factors, such as the job-search behavior of the unemployed, the mobility of the employed, the hiring practices of firms, wage negotiations between trade unions and employers, and the employment policies of different levels of government and their impact on the behavior of labor market forces. Unemployment Insurance and Active Labor Market Policy answers the questions: how much public funding do the unemployed receive in wage-replacement benefits and for how long; how much public funding is devoted for manpower programs and invested in "active" labor market policy; and finally, how are the necessary financial resources made available? In summary, the book investigates the relationship between the financing system and revenues and expenditures for labor market policy, the role played by market policy in employment policy as a whole, and the impact of the financing system for labor market policy on the classical goals of the welfare state. The findings of this comprehensive study should contribute to the redeployment of financial resources from those funds currently being used to finance unemployment (unemployment benefits, unemployment assistance, and public assistance) to financing employment.
"This important book by a major historian is the first to study how the problem of people out of work has been understood and dealt with in the Western world. Garraty discusses the ambivalent attitudes that people have always had toward work and how attitudes and perceptions have changed from ancient times to the present. He deals with what economists and philosophers have written about the problem over the centuries, with what public officials, heads of state, and politicians have said and done about it, with how effective the various "cures" have been, and with the situation today"--Book jacket.