Fighting Unemployment The Limits of Free Market Orthodoxy

by Howell, David R.

• ISBN13: 9780195165852
• ISBN10: 0195165853
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-12-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

With much of Europe plagued by high levels of unemployment, it has become widely accepted that the culprit is labor market rigidity and that the prescription can only be labor market deregulation: lower wages, higher earnings inequality, greater decentralization in bargaining, less generousunemployment benefits, more hiring flexibility, and less job security. Fighting Unemployment critically assesses this free market orthodoxy. With cross-country statistical analyses and country case studies, leading economists from seven North American and European countries contend that thisconventional wisdom has greatly exaggerated the extent to which the unemployment problem can be blamed on protective labor market institutions and that the case for dismantling the welfare state to fight unemployment rests more on free market ideology than on the empirical evidence. The largermessage of this book is that fundamentally different labor market models - ranging from the 'American Model' to the much more regulated and coordinated Scandinavian systems - are compatible with low unemployment.

Author Biography

David Howell, is Associate Dean and Professor of economics and public policy at the Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University (New York City). He also teaches in the Economics Department of the Graduate Faculty and is a Research Associate at the University's Center for Economic Policy Analysis (CEPA). His recent published work has addressed wage inequality in the United States, unemployment across OECD countries and the labor market implications of immigration in U.S. cities.

Table of Contents

Foreword	v
Contributors	xiii
Introduction	3	(32)
David R. Howell
Wage Compression and the Unemployment Crisis: Labor Market Institutions, Skills, and Inequality-Unemployment Tradeoffs	35	(37)
David R. Howell
Friedrich Huebler
Labor Market Institutions and Unemployment: A Critical Assessment of the Cross-Country Evidence	72	(47)
Dean Baker
Andrew Glyn
David R. Howell
John Schmitt
Testing the Flexibility Paradigm: Canadian Labor Market Performance in International Context	119	(37)
Jim Stanford
Is the OECD Jobs Strategy behind U.S. and British Employment and Unemployment Success in the 1990s?	156	(41)
John Schmitt
Jonathan Wadsworth
Labor Market Success and Labor Market Reform: Lessons from Ireland and New Zealand	197	(19)
Andrew Glyn
Employment Performance and Labor Market Institutions: The Case of Spain	216	(46)
Rafael Munoz de Bustillo Llorente
Is Labor Market Regulation at the Root of European Unemployment? The Case of Germany and the Netherlands	262	(22)
Ronald Schettkat
Labor Market Policy, Flexibility, and Employment Performance in Denmark and Sweden in the 1990s	284	(26)
Peter Plougmann
Per Kongshoj Madsen
Labor Market Institutions and Unemployment: An Assessment	310	(35)
David R. Howell
Index	345