The paper attempts to establish a few stylised facts about Euroland's labour market given the increasing importance of smoothly functioning markets in the EMU. We assemble econometric evidence regarding labour demand behaviour, wage-setting mechanisms and the cyclicality of unemployment in...

Austria is among the very few countries in the European Union which have managed to maintain comparatively low unemployment rates and high employment rates. In international comparison Austrian unemployment is very stable over the business cycle. This is mainly due to the high sensitivity of the...

This note presents employment policies aimed at containing the impact of the crisis on labour markets and assesses the effectiveness of these measures against a set of policy "do's and don'ts" and addresses the question whether further action is warranted.The global downturn is now strongly...

This note provides a brief overview of the work carried out under the auspices of DG ECFIN's fellowship initiative. While the economic policy agenda in Europe is currently dominated by lagging activity reflecting public and private balance-sheet problems and still impaired transmission of...

This brief discusses trends , drivers and policies related to European competitiveness in a global perspective. Over the past two decades, European industry was holding its own against both the old world competition from the US and Japan and newer rivals from China or India. But already before...

Die folgende Kurzdarstellung faßt die wichtigsten Ergebnisse zweier Evaluierungsstudien über Instrumente der experimentellen Arbeitsmarktpolitik zusammen, die von Helmut Hofer und Karl Pichelmann vom Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS) und von Gudrun Biffl vom Institut für...

This note gives a brief survey of main theoretical and empirical issues with respect to the NAIRU concept. According to modern labour market literature NAIRU is defined as the rate of unemployment at which inflation stabilizes in the absence of any wage-price surprises. Conventional thinking...