Zur Frage der Notwendigkeit einer strategischen Koordinierung der Beschäftigungspolitik in Europa (On the issue of the necessity of a strategic co-ordination of employment policy in Europe)

"This article provides an overview of the initiatives aimed at a European employment policy. The Amsterdam EC treaties gave reasons for newer approaches and procedures for the co-ordination of national employment policy in this respect. Which elements of a European employment strategy have been developed so far? How can the reforms be justified and assessed? For this in the first section an empirical analysis is provided of the development of the aggregate unemployment in connection with macroeconomic shock effects. The European perspective of the diagnosis is intended to outline the supranational problems which are the reason for the treaties describing the fight against unemployment as an 'issue in the common interest'. In addition to the relationships between the aggregate unemployment and the cyclical shocks, the problems of the persistence of unemployment are examined. These problems are associated with insufficient employment dynamics and the development of long-term unemployment in the EU countries. The diagnoses outlined for the development of unemployment in Europe therefore reveal a mixture of causal factors; to turn the argument on its head it can be concluded that a combination of employment policy measures is necessary to combat aggregate unemployment. In the second section the starting points of a European employment strategy are presented: after first systematically organising the relevant concept of employment policy against the background of a reference model, some answers follow on the fundamental question of the necessity of a European employment policy. The author approves of the issue in general - in contrast to various critics from the field of science. Then the first common employment policy guidelines which were passed by the European Council in 1997 are analysed and commented on in the form of a structured overview according to the reference model of the concept of employment policy. Finally in the third section the thesis of possible international learning effects in the field of employment policy is dealt with as an example: why have two smaller countries (Denmark and the Netherlands), which constitute relatively open economies, achieved clearly greater success in employment policy matters than other EU countries? In the conclusions in the fourth section the author attempts to touch on the possible perspectives and problems of implementing employment policy guidelines in the EU." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))