Comparing Greece and Portugal: Common employment trajectories but divergent outcomes?

The author investigates the implementation of labour policy reforms as part of the rescue programmes adopted in Greece and Portugal during the Great Recession. Both countries were strongly pressurized to reform their labour markets. However, while the content of policies was the same the changes then followed different pathways. Rather than considering path dependency and convergence as mutually exclusive, in this article the author contends that the concepts interact with each other and forge particular policy outcomes. Looking through the lens of a ‘contingent divergence’, it is argued that while the rescue programmes suggest a common policy trajectory of neoliberalism determining the content of policies, variation in the political ownership of the reform programmes and the subsequent disparity in reform implementation, government approaches to social dialogue, public policy choices and programme design faults have played their part in the diverse policy outcomes. Considering this, path dependence pressures account for divergence, while the common direction of the reforms defines the field within which the former takes place.