Most governments in today's market economies spend significant sums of money on labour market programmes. The declared aims of these programmes are to increase the re-employment chances of the unemployed. This book investigates which active labour market programmes in Poland are value for money and which are not. To this end, modern statistical methods are applied to both macro- and microeconomic data. It is shown that training programmes increase, whereas job subsidies and public works decrease the re-employment opportunities of the unemployed. In general, all active labour market policy effects are larger in absolute size for men than for women. By surveying previous studies in the field and outlining the major statistical approaches that are employed in the evaluation literature, the book can be of help to any student interested in programme evaluation irrespective of the paticular programme or country concerned.

For some time, it has been debated whether a lack of wage flexibility is at the roots of the high and persistent unemployment in West Germany. In the presence of a skill bias in labor demand, which increases the relative de mand for more highly skilled labor over time, there only seems to exist the choice between higher wage inequality or higher unemployment rates. This study scrutinizes whether and in what way this line of thought is consis tent with empirical findings for West Germany. The analysis ranges from extensive descriptive evidence on wage trends to the estimation of a struc tural model of wage bargaining. As the most important database, I use the IAB-Beschiiftigtenstichprobe from 1975 to 1990. This study was accepted as a Habilitation thesis by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Konstanz in October 1998. The only major change relates to appendix B on the block bootstrap procedure now summarizing the main aspects of the method. I am very grateful to my advisor Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Franz for his support, encouragement, and inspiration. From 1993 to 1997, he ran the Center for International Labor Economics at the University of Konstanz in such a way that it provided a fruitful environment for empirical research in labor economics. I am also indebted to Prof. Dr. Winfried Pohlmeier and to Prof. Dr. Gerd Ronning for undertaking the task to evaluate my Habilitation thesis."

Globalisation is normally associated with expanded international trade in goods and services. In view ofhigh and persistent unemploymentin European countries during the last two decades opponents of globali- sation argue that increased import competition, particularly from low- wage countries,influences the domestic labour markets adversely. How- ever, the advocates of open markets stress that this is a misconception about the impact offoreign trade;their view is that the employment ef- fects depend to a large extent on the degree offlexibility ofthe domestic labour markets. This debate has induced Pia WeiB to examine the unemployment prob- lem in an open economy within a rigorously theoretical framework. The focus is on the mismatch between labour demand andlabour supply. For that purpose, new modelsin labour economics concerningthe searchand matching theory are used. It is shown that an increased competition on the world goods markets leads to an increase inthe industrialised coun- try's unemployment rate only ifthe wages are not fully flexible. At the same time, it is demonstrated that changes on the world markets may help to explain the observed development ofthe unemployment vacancy ratio. The study provides valuable insights which might enrich the subjects taught at undergraduate courses. Scholars interested in the interaction of foreign trade and employment may find in the study suggestions for future research. The research forthis studyhasbeenundertakenatthe Institutfur Wirt- VIII Preface schaftspolitik (Institute of Political Economy), University of Cologne.

Changes in the international environment, from the stagflation of the 1970s to the globalization of capital markets in the 1990s, have challenged the ability of all advanced welfare states to maintain postwar achievements of full employment, social security and social equality. Nevertheless, national responses and actual performance differed greatly. This two-volume study examines the adjustment to external economic challenges over three decades in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom Volume I presents comparative analyses of differences in the vulnerabilities and capabilities of these countries, in the effectiveness of their policy responses, and in the role of values and discourses in the politics of adjustment Volume II presents in-depth analyses of the experiences of the countries, including special studies on the participation of women in the labour market, early retirement, the liberalization of public services and international tax competition.

What models of distributive justice can the 21st century promote to challenge the spread of insecurity, inequality and social fragmentation? The 20th century was dominated by competition between two labour models of society state socialism and welfare state capitalism, which promoted forms of labour security. Since the 1970s, globalization and flexible labour markets have increased insecurity and inequalities. After a period dominated by libertarianism, politicians and social thinkers must find ways of promoting distributive justice, based on basic security and new forms of voice representation and regulation. Dismissing the approach of the "new paternalists", this book presents a vision combining security of income and representation without moralistic state control.

In the last 25 years, Europe has experienced a reduction in growth and an explosion in unemployment. At a time when this and the continuing existence of the welfare state are top of the European agenda, it has become increasingly popular to blame the globalization of the world economy for current problems. This book provides the first comprehensive set of studies on the impact of trade with developing countries on the European labour market. It argues that the evidence does not point to trade with developing countries as a major cause of European unemployment. Instead, technological change and domestic policy choices are the main causal factors. As a result, the contributors argue against protectionist trade polices, whose benefits to employment would be limited at best, but whose risk to world growth due to trade wars is immense. The next ten years are a critical period for European integration and expansion: Trade and Jobs in Europe will be of crucial importance to all those at the heart of the current debate: advisers, policy-makers, and researchers alike.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow directs his attention here to one of today's most controversial social issues: how to get people off welfare and into jobs. With characteristic eloquence, wit, and rigor, Solow condemns the welfare reforms recently passed by Congress and President Clinton for confronting welfare recipients with an unworkable choice--finding work in the current labor market or losing benefits. He argues that the only practical and fair way to move recipients to work is, in contrast, through an ambitious plan to guarantee that every able-bodied citizen has access to a job.

Solow contends that the demand implicit in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for welfare recipients to find work in the existing labor market has two crucial flaws. First, the labor market would not easily make room for a huge influx of unskilled, inexperienced workers. Second, the normal market adjustment to that influx would drive down earnings for those already in low-wage jobs. Solow concludes that it is legitimate to want welfare recipients to work, but not to want them to live at a miserable standard or to benefit at the expense of the working poor, especially since children are often the first to suffer. Instead, he writes, we should create new demand for unskilled labor through public-service employment and incentives to the private sector--in effect, fair "workfare." Solow presents widely ignored evidence that recipients themselves would welcome the chance to work. But he also points out that practical, morally defensible workfare would be extremely expensive--a problem that politicians who support the idea blithely fail to admit. Throughout, Solow places debate over welfare reform in the context of a struggle to balance competing social values, in particular self-reliance and altruism.

The book originated in Solow's 1997 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. It includes reactions from the distinguished scholars Gertrude Himmelfarb, Anthony Lewis, Glenn Loury, and John Roemer, who expand on and take issue with Solow's arguments. "Work and Welfare" is a powerful contribution to debate about welfare reform and a penetrating look at the values that shape its course.

Established in 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of the most ambitious federal jobs programs ever created in the U.S. At its peak, the program provided work for almost 3.5 million Americans, employing more than 8 million people across its eight-year history in projects ranging from constructing public buildings and roads to collecting oral histories and painting murals. The story of the WPA provides a perfect entry point into the history of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the early years of World War II, while its example remains relevant today as the debate over government's role in the economy continues. In this concise narrative, supplemented by primary documents and an engaging companion website, Sandra Opdycke explains the national crisis from which the WPA emerged, traces the program's history, and explores what it tells us about American society in the 1930s and 1940s. Covering central themes including the politics, race, class, gender, and the coming of World War II, The WPA: Creating Jobs During the Great Depression introduces readers to a key period of crisis and change in U.S. history.

Amidst the current debates on the future of welfare, one voice has been conspicuously absent: that of the unemployed and underprivileged. The result of almost a half-century of research, "America Before Welfare" traces the leadership and activities of the unemployed from industrialization to the outbreak of World War II. It is at once a profound work of history and an anecdotal window onto America's past, in the days before FDR's New Deal.

The outstanding moral problem of our time is the emergence of an underclass, provoking both pity and an angry political backlash. Robin Marris finds that a slowdown in growth is the root cause, leading to a collapse of the labour market for unskilled men in particular. Fashionable solutions such as lower wages or welfare reform benefit those already well-off, and exacerbate growing income inequality. He employs statistical, sociological and psychological analysis and new developments in 'brain science' to show how the creation of an open society with increased equality of opportunity risks creating an unnecessarily excessive meritocracy. The solution is restoring national and international priority to the objective of growth. If this fails, damage limitation is essential. We must learn to live with the welfare state.

'Have we given up trying to gain full employment?' 'If not, what should we be trying to do about it?' These are the fundamental questions that James Meade poses, and attempts to answer, in this short but timely book. As the issue of full employment moves once again to the centre of the political debate, Professor Meade draws our attention to a number of economic and financial factors which are neglected in debate, and suggests a novel package of changes which could be used to tackle the full employment problem. He condemns the neglect of macroeconomic analysis in designing full-employment policies, and asserts that the money value of total domestic production rather than the price level should be the object of a combined fiscal-monetary policy, which itself should focus on low interest rates rather than low tax rates.

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments-and why we can't see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

Since the economic and financial crisis of 2008, the proportion of unemployed young people has exceeded any other group of unemployed adults. This phenomenon marks the emergence of a laborscape. This concept recognizes that, although youth unemployment is not consistent across the world, it is a coherent problem in the global political economy. This book examines this crisis of youth unemployment, drawing on international case studies. It is organized around four key dimensions of the crisis: precarity, flexibility, migration, and policy responses. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the chapters offer a dynamic portrait of unemployment and how this is being challenged through new modes of resistance. This book provides cross-national comparisons, both ethnographic and quantitative, to explore the contours of this laborscape on the global, national, and local scales. Throughout these varied case studies is a common narrative from young workers, families, students, volunteers, and activists facing a new and growing problem. This book will be an imperative resource for students and researchers looking at the sociology of globalization, global political economy, labor markets, and economic geography.

This book is the result of five years of research that I carried out as a research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam. The project was initiated in 1986 by Frans van Winden and Roy Thurik. Frans van Winden became interested in self employment through his work concerning government behavior. In the models that he employs, the government is influenced by various social groups, the political strength of which is related to their size. As one of these is the group of self-employed individuals, he became interested in determinants of the size of this group. Roy Thurik was professionally interested in the subject because of his work at the Research Institute for Small and Medium-sized Business in the Netherlands (EIM), an institute that does much research in this area. Together, they wrote a proposal for a research project, for which they received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs . These funds were supplemented by the University of Amsterdam and at a later stage by the Organization for the Advancement of Research in the Economic Discipline (ECOZOEK), that is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This support is gratefully acknowiedged. The commercial edition of this book was partIy financed by the Centre for Energy Conservation and Environmental Technology (CE), the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decisionmaking (CREED), and the University of Amsterdam."

In contemporary labor economics increasing attention is paid to the fact that unemployment is not only a stock but also a flow phenomenon. The present micro-econometric study analyses the impact of important socio-economic characteristics on unemployment duration in West Germany. Based on a search theoretic framework unemployment duration is considered as a stochastic process whose evolution is influenced by economicand demographic variables like unemployment benefits, expected wage offers, training and age. This is modeled by application of the concept of the hazard rate which denotes the conditional exit rate from unemployment over time given elapsed unemployment duration. Contrasting more traditional models a semi-parametric approachis chosen which reduces the danger of mis-specification of the stochastic duration process. This procedure also is particularly suitable for the analysis of grouped observations on unemployment duration typically generated by longitudinal data sets as the German "Socio-Economic Panel" which is utilized for this study. Besides deriving a set of empirical results on unemployment duration in West Germanymethodological issues of duration analysis are considered with particular attention paid to the impact of the sample design. Also, important outcomes from search theory and findings from other hazard rate analysesare surveyed.

The gender wage gap is one of the most persistent problems of labor markets and women's lives. Most approaches to explaining the gap focus on adult employment despite the fact that many Americans begin working well before their education is completed. In her critical and compelling new book, The Cost of Being a Girl, Yasemin Besen-Cassino examines the origins of the gender wage gap by looking at the teenage labor force, where comparisons between boys and girls ought to show no difference, but do. Besen-Cassino's findings are disturbing. Because of discrimination in the market, most teenage girls who start part-time work as babysitters and in other freelance jobs fail to make the same wages as teenage boys who move into employee-type jobs. The "cost" of being a girl is also psychological; when teenage girls work retail jobs in the apparel industry, they have lower wages and body image issues in the long run. Through in-depth interviews and surveys with workers and employees, The Cost of Being a Girl puts this alarming social problem-which extends to race and class inequality-in to bold relief. Besen-Cassino emphasizes that early inequalities in the workplace ultimately translate into greater inequalities in the overall labor force.

The analysis will be conducted within an IS-LM model augmen- ted by the dynamics of money wages, private capital and public debt. A macroeconomic shock induces an extended process of adjustment that is characterized by unemployment. This in turn requires a dynamic path of monetary and fiscal policy: As a response to the shock, the central bank continuouslyadapts the quantity of money so as to keep up full employment all the time. And the government continuously accommodates its purchases of goods and services. Can this be sustained? Or will public debt tend to explode, thereby driving the stock of capial down to zero?

High and persistent unemployment rates in Europe during the eighties gave rise to a lively discussion about the nature and causes of joblessness. Among other sources structural unemployment was blamed for the lack of response of unemployment to increasing aggregate demand. Renewed attention was thus devoted to an analysis of the magnitude and the development of structural unemployment as well to its possi ble determinants. In this literature, the Beveridge curve experienced a resurrection and, at first glance, it seemed to be an appropriate tool to analyse the aforementioned issues. However, it was soon recognized that the Beveridge curve, i. e. the relation between unemployment and vacancies, was anything but stable, thus requiring a care ful distinction between dynamic loops around a (stable?) long-run Beveridge curve and possible shifts due to, say, an increasing mismatch between labor supplied and demanded. The controversy is far from being settled at the time of this writing. This book contains a collection of hitherto unpublished papers which are devoted to a theoretical and econometric analysis of structural unemployment. The papers put considerable emphasis on the question to what extent the Beveridge curve can serve as an adequate tool for such studies. The countries under consideration are Germany and Austria. In what follows a very brief summary of each paper will be outlined. Franz and Siebeck present, at some length, a theoretical and econometric analysis of the Beveridge curve in Germany."

Bryan M. Evans, Stephen McBride, and their contributors delve further into the more practical, ground-level side of the austerity equation in Austerity: The Lived Experience. Economically, austerity policies cannot be seen to work in the way elite interests claim that they do. Rather than soften the blow of the economic and financial crisis of 2008 for ordinary citizens, policies of austerity slow growth and lead to increased inequality. While political consent for such policies may have been achieved, it was reached amidst significant levels of disaffection and strong opposition to the extremes of austerity. The authors build their analysis in three sections, looking alternatively at theoretical and ideological dimensions of the lived experience of austerity; how austerity plays out in various public sector occupations and policy domains; and the class dimensions of austerity. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of austerity politics and policies.

This volume and its companion "Conquering Unemployment: The Case for Economic Growth" examine major aspects of the Employment Institute's published output in its first three years of operation. The Institute is a research organization founded to promote study and debate on the problems of unemployment and to encourage research into the best methods of reducing unemployment figures without setting in motion an inflationary upsurge.;The book contains a series of essays covering both macroeconomic and microeconomic solutions to explain why alternative prescriptions to monetarism could have avoided the massive surge of unemployment in the 1980s. Contributors suggest possible structural reforms which would permit the economy to be expanded further without rekindling inflation and allow a lower level of unemployment to be sustained. Two innovations are explored in the field of wage-setting: profit-sharing between employees and share-holders, and the use of either tax incentives to employers or agreements with unions to restrain wage increases.;The book takes a fresh look at regional policy and evaluates the case for concentrating financial aid on small firms. A new approach to reabsorbin

A companion text to "Making the Economy Work", this book covers major aspects of the Employment Institute's published output in its first three years. Based on pamphlets produced by the Institute, it explains why alternative action to "monetarism" could have avoided the rise in unemployment in the early 1980s. It states that if implemented now, these policies could ensure that recent reductions in unemployment would be hastened and sustained.;The policies recommended cover both macroeconomic and microeconomic solutions. The contributions in this book concentrate on the macroeconomic side whilst those in "Making the Economy Work" focus on microeconomic or structural issues.;The present volume asks whether the government should increase its own expenditure levels or reduce tax rates in order to stimulate economic activity. The contriubutors discuss how the government should set interest rates and what its attitude should be to the level of the exchange rate. They also attempt to show what went wrong with "good housekeeping" and "tight money" approaches of the first Thatcher administration.;The aim throughout is to tackle complex economic issues in as readable and non-technical a manner as possible.

This book examines the interaction between multinationals and women in UK, Ireland, France and Germany, looking at inward investment by US and Japanese multinationals, as well as outward investment by European multinationals.;It attempts to show how multinationals perpetuate an unequal division of labour by gender in which women production workers are merely "nimble fingers". It discusses whether multinationals are exporting women's jobs from Europe in an international search for cheap labour; and it looks at how women have reacted to both the creation and destruction of employment by multinationals.

This is an important contribution to the study of the characteristics and behaviour of the unemployed especially in their search for work. It is based on the analysis of unusually good data on a large cohort of men registering as unemployed in 1978, which enables the authors to overcome many of the problems of measuring the effects of economic, demographic and policy variables on unemployment. The results presented will interest labour economists and anyone involved in the policy debate on unemployment.

Affirmative action is still a reality of the American workplace. How is it that such a controversial Federal program has managed to endure for more than five decades? Inside Affirmative Action addresses this question. Beyond the usual ideological debate and discussions about the effects of affirmative action for either good or ill upon issues of race and gender in employment, this book recounts and analyzes interviews with people who worked in the program within the government including political appointees. The interviews and their historical context provide understanding and insight into the policies and politics of affirmative action and its role in advancing civil rights in America. Recent books published on affirmative action address university admissions, but very few of them ever mention Executive Order 11246 or its enforcement by an agency within the Department of Labor - let alone discuss in depth the profound workplace diversity it has created or the employment opportunities it has generated. This book charts that history through the eyes of those who experienced it. Inside Affirmative Action will be of interest to those who study American race relations, policy, history and law.

* Presents research aimed at helping the construction industry benchmark against Sustainable development Goal 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth