Abstract German (English abstract is added below) Arbeitslosigkeit gilt als eines der schwerwiegendsten gesellschaftlichen Probleme unserer Zeit. Doch welche Gründe liegen, trotz der über die Jahre eingeleiteten Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit, für die anhaltende...

“We risk having a generation that hasn’t held a job. Personal dignity comes from working [...] Young people are in a crisis". Pope Francis - July the 22nd, 2013. Youth unemployment is a critical issue across the European Union with 5.5 million people unemployed among the 18-24 years age...

The relation of the Greek employment policy to the European one, as it was formulated within EES and the Lisbon strategy, was a particular one. The Greek employment policy fully adopted the form, the structure and the discourse of the EES but it was only marginally influenced by the “way of...

In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concern-ing Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country in the nine-ties, according to OECD indexes. In particular, worker and job flow rates are remarkably high,...

This paper looks at some of the fundamental ideas in contemporary economics such as the basic economic problem, opportunity cost and allocation a person is expected to encounter when they are first introduced to economic theory. It attempts to explain how the manner in which these concepts are...

Many social policy reforms have been carried out in Europe in the last fifteen years. Most of these reforms are marginal. Often they are mutually inconsistent. Yet, something is changing in the European social policy landscape and not in the direction implied by the presence of a 'race to the...

This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

Several theoretical and methodological perspectives have been used to understand the trans-formations occurred during the last 20 years in the Costa Rican State. This work aims to de-fine a coherent approach of such transformations in order to understand them and be able to offer possible...

A comparison of the 2007-08 crisis with that of 1929 showed its extreme gravity, but it also may have implied that the old harmful mistakes would not be repeated. After four years, the crisis has not been solved and it even threatens to worsen. Neo-conservative Republicans claim that this is...