The Political Economy of Labour Market Policies in Western and Eastern European Countries

Abstract

Discussions on how to organize European labour markets are one of the key public policy issues of today. In European policy debates, the most important concepts seem to be 'flexicurity' and the 'transitional labour market'. In this report we examine the cross-country variation in the generosity of unemployment benefits, which is a key element of the flexicurity model. Building on the political economy literature, we test hypotheses on the role of partisan politics, employment relations and employment protection legislation and active labour market policies in unemployment benefit reform. These factors have been extensively studied in the political economy literature, but hardly for Eastern European countries, because of a lack of data. We employ pooled time series

Determinants of top personal income tax rates in 19 OECD countries, 1981–2018

“…I also add an index of consensus democracy by Armingeon et al (2020a). 12 I measure corporatism by constructing an index that closely resembles the one used by Van Vliet et al (2012). The index adds standardised scores of four variables, denoting: country-wide wage coordination; routine involvement of unions and employers in social and economic policy-making; an index denoting the centralised power of the main union confederation; and the union density rate.…”