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Labour market reforms face very often opposition from the employed workers, because it normally reduces their wages. Also product market regulations are regularly biased towards too much benefitting the firms. As a result there remain many frictions in both the labour and product markets that hinder an optimal functioning of the economy. These issues have recently received a lot of attention in the economics literature and scholars have been looking for politically viable reforms in both markets. However, despite its potential importance, there has been done virtually no research on the interaction between reforms in product and labour markets. We find that when combining reforms, the opposition for reforms decreases considerably. This is because there exist complementarities and the gains in total welfare can be more evenly distributed over the interest groups. Moreover, the interaction of reforms offers a way out for the so-called 'sclerosis' effect.

This book empirically investigates the changes in labor market structure accompanying the labor market reform in China by focusing on the labor market segmentation problems from the 1980s to 2013. The book also aims to examine the effect of labor policy reforms on individual, household and enterprise behavior, including the causes and consequences of labor market reform in China, particularly the influences of labor policy reforms on labor market performance. Offering valuable insights into the changing structure of the Chinese economy, this book will be of interest to scholars, activists, and economists.

Labour market reforms face very often opposition from the employed workers, because it normally reduces their wages. Also product market regulations are regularly biased towards too much benefitting the firms. As a result there remain many frictions in both the labour and product markets that hinder an optimal functioning of the economy. These issues have recently received a lot of attention in the economics literature and scholars have been looking for politically viable reforms in both markets. However, despite its potential importance, there has been done virtually no research on the interaction between reforms in product and labour markets. We find that when combining reforms, the opposition for reforms decreases considerably. This is because there exist complementarities and the gains in total welfare can be more evenly distributed over the interest groups. Moreover, the interaction of reforms offers a way out for the so-called 'sclerosis' effect.

This Policy Insight is based on the SOE 2015 chapter "Labour Market Reforms for Growth", which concentrates on four main issues faced by the labour market. First, the immediate challenge faced by the labour market is to source the workers needed to operate envisioned development plans of the country. However, already the country is faced with skill shortages. Second, The population ageing and the working age population is declining. These demographic effects on the economy need to be mitigated through better utilization of existing labour resources. Third, effective human resource planning is hindered due to lack of information, limited coordination between different labour market institutions, and the changing structure and affiliations of the labour market institutions and the conflicting objectives of the different labour market institutions. Fourth, the duality in the labour market needs to be reduced to encourage job creation and productivity.

ABSTRACTEuropean labour markets have undergone several important innovations over the last three decades. Most countries have reformed their labour markets since the mid‐1990s, with the liberalization of fixed‐term contracts and temporary work agencies being the common elements to such reforms. This paper investigates the existence of a change in the dynamic behaviour of the aggregate employment for major European Union countries – France, Germany, Italy and Spain. According to our results, partial labour market reforms have made the response of the aggregate employment to output shocks larger and quite comparable to that found for the UK – the most flexible labour market in Europe since the Thatcher reforms.

Most European countries are affected by high unemployment rates. Among the OECD countries, the performance of the Spanish labour market is among the worst as far as employment activity is concerned, with unemployment rates during the 1990s having reached levels far exceeding 20%. Accordingly, employment creation has been one of the primary challenges facing the Spanish government since 1980. We follow the approached used by the OECD, by which a division into passive and active policies is established, which is used by a significant number of scholars. While passive policies are those which act as a buffer against unemployment, active policies are geared towards solving the labour-related problems from their roots, so to speak. The present report is organised as follows. First, we will introduce the nature of the unemployment problem in Spain and explore its main causes. In Section II, we go on to survey the current state of the Spanish labour market, dividing the labour reforms into passive and active policies. Upon discussing passive policies, we will analyse in some detail the reform of May 2002, which has provoked a general strike in Spain. Section III provides the historical context and identifies the paradigms at work, laying particular emphasis on the Reforms of 1994 and 1997, as well as the different reforms carried out on part-time work. We will also discuss there what constitutes in our opinion two of the most important features of the Spanish labour market: the issues of segmentation and collective bargaining in Spain. This discussion could serve as a basis for stimulating future research on the idiosyncratic features of the Spanish labour market.