Suchergebnisse

Liberalization, wage bargaining, supply-side employment policies, and remapping economic citizenship; 1990s, chiefly; European Union.

This paper surveys the direction of change to employment regimes in the EU, in which fiscal consolidation constitutes the macro-economic foundations to labour markets in virtually every member-state. Attempting to address budget deficits has had important spillover effects, most notably on the conduct of pay determination. In particular, multi-tier bargaining in Europe has been revived not to conclude the social corporatist deals of the past but to reorient labour market behaviour to the introduction of a single currency. Support systems for the unemployed are also experiencing wide-ranging reforms across the EU: governments are attempting to shift expenditure from passive measures to more direct initiatives to help people get back to work. The prospect for closer cross-national collaboration on labour market matters has increased by Brussels launching a programme to benchmark employment policies across the EU. Together, these changes are streamlining Social Europe and reorganising the sovereign boundaries of economic citizenship.

Introduction / Katsikas, Dimitris and Manasse -- Designing structural reforms in times of crisis : lessons from the past / Katsikas, Dimitris -- The political conditions for economic reform in Europe's south / Terzi, Alessio -- The persistence-resilience trade-off in unemployment the role of labor and product market institutions / Aksoy, Tolga and Manasse, Paolo -- Reforms and external balances in southern Europe and Ireland / CatÆo, Lus A. V -- Labour market reform in Portugal under the adjustment programme lessons for policy design / Turrini, Alessandro -- Some unpleasant labour arithmetics a tale of the Spanish 2012 labour market reform / Cuerpo, Carlos, Geli, Federico and Herrero, Carlos -- Balancing adjustment policies and structural reforms in Greece : the case of product markets / Petralias, Athanassios, Anastasatou, Marianthi and Katsikas, Dimitris -- The political economy of Cyprus : financial sector reform / Clerides, Sofronis -- Non-performing loans in the European periphery : the political economy of reform / Panagiotarea, Eleni -- The restructuring of Spain's banking system : a political economy approach / Otero-Iglesias, Miguel and Steinberg, Federico -- Conclusions / Manasse, Paolo and Katsikas, Dimitris

The focus of this analysis is on new modes of governance and government in the European Union that (a) include private actors in policy formulation, and/or (b) while being based on public actors, (c) are only marginally based on legislation (these are hierarchical insofar as they are subject to a majority decision) or that are not based on legislation at all. In recent years non-legislative modes of policy-making and modes of governance including private actors in policy-formulation have gained in salience in European policy-making, and they have been advocated as a panacea for speeding up European decision making, which has so often ended up in gridlocks (Héritier 1999). The European integration project has reached a stage where core areas of the welfare state such as employment policy, social policy, and education are directly affected. These are areas where member state political support is very difficult to gain (Jacobsson 2001). Hence a method of cooperation has been developed to avoid the classical form of legislation through directives and regulations; instead, it relies on the open method of coordination, that is, target development and published scoreboards of national performance, as measured by the policy objectives that have been agreed upon, as well as voluntary accords, that is, the self-regulation of private actors.