Contracting out job placement services might save costs and provide a service capacity buffer in times of increasing unemployment. However, state agencies must be able to ensure a suitable balance between services and quality, and to carefully monitor and evaluate private provider outcomes....

Can Germany in the 1990s provide a contemporary example of the "uneasy triangle" posited by The Economist in the early 1950s? As the millennium approached, Germany's inflation rate was very low; its unemployment rate unacceptably high; and its system of collective bargaining arguably the...

Why, at the onset of a downturn in economic activity and an upswing in unemployment (in the early 2000’s), did the leading trade unions in Germany decide to demand-and in some cases strike for- larger wage increases and denounce a government-led policy of wage moderation, rather than...