Does the Recent Success of Some OECD Countries in Lowering Their Unemployment Rates Lie in the Clever Design of Their Labour Market Reforms?

By J. van Ours, Michèle Belot. Social Science Research Network, 2000

369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The development of the unemployment rate differs substantially between OECD countries. In recent years some countries experienced a mild increase, other countries had a stable unemployment rate, while there are also ‘successful’ countries in which the unemployment rate decreased a lot. A common feature of the successful countries is that they implemented a comprehensive set of institutional reforms. In this paper we present a theoretical and empirical framework to investigate how unemployment is affected by different labour market institutions (LMI) such as labour taxes, unemployment benefits, employment protection, union bargaining power and (de)centralisation of bargaining. We argue that complementarities between LMI can be exploited to improve labour market performance. In our empirical analysis of annual data over the period 1960-1995 of eighteen OECD countries we show that interactions between LMI are indeed important. JEL classification : E24, J68

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

Youth Unemployment in the OECD: Demographic Shifts, Labour Market Institutions, and Macroeconomic Shocks (2002, background): “…papers in this branch of the literature used cross-sectional or pooled cross-sectional data on indicators of labour market performance and labour market institutions to account for unemployment differentials across countries (see Scarpetta, 1996, Nickell and Layard, 1999, Belot and van Ours, 2000).”
Unions and labour market institutions in Europe (2002, background): “However, as Belot and van Ours (2000) have forcibly pointed out, it is the combination of institutions that matters for labour market performance, and therefore we have to resort to multivariate analysis.”
The Beveridge Curve, Unemployment, and Wages in the OECD from the 1960s to the 1990s (2001, methodology): “Co-ordination 1 was provided by Michèle Belot to whom much thanks (see Belot and van Ours, 2000, for details).”
Employment Regulations Through the Eyes of Employers: Do They Matter and How Do Firms Respond to Them? (2004, positive): “(1998), Belot and van Ours (2000) and Nicoletti and Scarpetta (2004) suggest that stringent employment protection tend to increase structural unemployment (or reduce employment) in countries where the higher labor costs associated to employment protection are not transferred onto”
The CEP-OECD institutions data set (1960-2004) (2006, methodology): “were matched with the data provided by Belot and Van Ours (2000) .”
Unemployment in the OECD Since the 1960s. What Do We Know (2005, methodology): “1. Based on interpolations of OECD data (OECD Employment Outlook 1994, 1997) and data made available by Miche`le Belot, described in Belot and van Ours (2000) .”
Institutions and Wage Determination: a Multi-Country Approach (2005, neutral): “(10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC LABC(-1) 0.”