Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation -...

Die deutsche Bundesregierung plant die Einführung eines flächendeckenden Mindestlohns. Dieser Beitrag fasst die vorliegenden nationalen und internationalen Erfahrungen mit Mindestlöhnen zusammen. Er analysiert dabei die Konsequenzen für Beschäftigung und Einkommensverteilung und legt eine...

Der deutsche Arbeitsmarkt hat sich in den letzten Jahren stark verändert. Es sind viele zusätzliche Arbeitsplätze entstanden. Das bedeutet aber nicht, dass die Politik in der neuen Legislaturperiode nichts mehr zu tun hätte. Zwei wesentliche Handlungsfelder stehen auf der Agenda: die...

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...

The enlargement of the European Union provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of the lifting of migration restrictions on the migrant sending countries. With EU enlargement in 2004, 1.2 million workers from Eastern Europe emigrated to the UK and Ireland. I use this emigration wave to...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called "Bolkestein" directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of goods...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

Low international competitiveness of a set of euro area countries, which have become evident by large current account deficits and rising risk premiums on government bonds, is one of the most challenging economic policy issues for Europe. We analyse the role of private restructuring and public...