This paper explores whether collective insurance schemes of various kinds could improve the degree of cyclical income stabilisation and the operation of fiscal stabilisers in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). We review the potential issues, the underlying trade-offs and the...

This paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical EU-based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment. While the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as...

This paper aims at examining wage compression in Europe, defined as a relatively small wage differentials compared with productivity differences. Using the publicly available data on wages drawn from the Structure of Earnings Survey 2002, it considers the existence of wage compression both...

The paper decomposes GDP both in terms of level per capita and growth rate, so as to identify the extent of labour utilisation in Europe and its effect on income differences and economic growth in all EU27 countries. While some caveats are associated with this approach, GDP is broken down into 5...