While policymakers in Europe were busy implementing EMU during the past decade, persistently high unemployment, which should have been the main policy issue from a normative point of view, was essentially left untackled in most continental European countries. This poses the urgent question which...

This paper deals with the much discussed question how to design labor market policy in a global economy. The starting point of the paper is the fact that national unemployment rates differ greatly, which alludes to country-specific institutional factors being the most plausible culprit for...