In order to reduce unemployment, it is often recommended that industry-level wage bargaining in Germany should be … replaced by a more decentralized system. This paper provides a critical assessment of the current wage bargaining institutions … into the comparison, the unformly superior employment performance of a decentralized wage bargaining system is questioned …

This paper examines critically the system of industry-level wage bargaining in Germany. More specifically, it shows … that the importance of industry-level wage bargaining declines in Germany and that one major reason for this development is … the highly restrictive institutional framework. However, fully decentralized wage bargaining at the firm level also …