Spain and Portugal are two neighbour economies which share many characteristics. Spanish unemployment is more than double Portuguese unemployment, however. In this chapter we resort to Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) techniques to ascertain which shocks and what propagation mechanism...

This paper investigates the impact of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over the period 1991-4. Econometric results suggest that levels of these policies - including a dramatic reduction of ALMP spending in Slovakia by more than two-thirds in 1993 -...

This paper studies the effect of economic integration of two regions on the mobility of skilled and unskilled workers across regions and on the resulting location of industrial activity. In particular, it studies what happens when wages in both regions are set by the unions of the ‘West’ –...

The paper analyses the pressures on the pace of reform that can arise through fiscal constraints. A simple analytical framework is used to illustrate the relation between the budget deficit and the pace of restructuring, unemployment, and the relative dynamics of state and private firms. It is...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8-10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary in uence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical uctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

This paper examines the impacts of the current economic slowdown on employment generation and unemployment in Vietnam. The study reports that as the country has experienced a slowdown, there would be an employment shortfall of around half million jobs in 2009. And if the growth prospect of 2010...

The idea of the 'L-shaped aggregate supply curve', supposedly a feature of primitive macroeconomic models, is in fact a reasonable reconstruction of a well developed way of thinking that specifically denied a relation between wage change and aggregate employment.  Neither that approach nor the...

This paper argues that Marx’s views on globalization and its supposed inevitability underwent a substantial evolution and revision after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. His writings relating to India, and particularly China and Russia, show that he was no longer certain that “the...

We document a clear increase in Swedish earnings inequality in the early 1990s, and that much of this increase was generated by movements in and out of the labor market. Inequality in disposable income and earnings net of taxes and transfers also increased, but much less than the increased...