IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp0644.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are European Labor Markets As Awful As All That?

Author

Listed:
  • Richard Freeman

Abstract

"The standard explanation of why advanced Europe has generated less work per adult thanthe US is that something is seriously amiss with EU labor markets. The theme of this piece issimple. Compared to an ideal competitive market, EU labor markets fall seriously short, butcompared to labor markets in the US and to other markets in advanced capitalist countries,EU labor markets do not live up to their awful press. The variety of labor market institutionsamong EU countries, moreover, reveals a much richer picture of performance and diversitythan the blanket condemnation of inflexibility suggests. I make my case in four propositions,with supporting evidence. My comparisons are with the actual labor market in the US andwith other real world markets, not with the economists' dream ideal competitive markets. Ireview briefly the evidence that labor markets in the EU have performed worse on thequantity side of the market but better on the price or wage side of the market than the USlabor market, then consider the extent to which differences in outcomes are attributable todifferences in the performance of labor markets."

Suggested Citation

  • Richard Freeman, 2004. "Are European Labor Markets As Awful As All That?," CEP Discussion Papers dp0644, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0644
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0644.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chatterji, Monojit, 2008. "Training hold up and social labour markets," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 202-214, April.
    2. Nick Adnett & Stephen Hardy, 2007. "The peculiar case of age discrimination: Americanising the European social model?," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 29-41, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    labour markets; US; EU; labour market institutions;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0644. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.