In the late nineties, Germany was often seen as a laggard with respect to labor market and welfare state reforms with institutional inertia being reflected in notoriously sluggish employment growth and rising unemployment. Recent years, however, saw a complex sequence of reforms with regard to labor market-related institutions such as labor market regulation, social benefits, active and activating labor market policies and attempts to reduce the burden of payroll taxes and - last but not least - a series of changes in collective bargaining. The paper shows if and to what extent labor-market related reforms in Germany have in fact contributed to overcoming structural weaknesses of a Continental European ‘welfare state without work’ and creating an institutional setup more conducive to strong employment growth and lower unemployment. We provide a detailed institutional analysis of the most relevant reforms in both public policies and collective bargaining and evaluate their effects on labor market structures and dynamics that can be identified so far. In particular we focus on the development of different types of employment and raise the question whether these upcoming non-standard forms of employment may be sustainable with respect to the future of the German labor market.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
2215.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Gernandt, Johannes & Pfeiffer, Friedhelm, 2006.
"Rising Wage Inequality in Germany,"
ZEW Discussion Papers
06-19 [rev.], ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.
[Downloadable!]
Pfeiffer, Friedhelm & Gernandt, Johannes, 2007.
"Rising Wage Inequality in Germany,"
ZEW Discussion Papers
06-019 [rev.2], ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.
[Downloadable!]
Gernandt, Johannes & Pfeiffer, Friedhelm, 2006.
"Rising Wage Inequality in Germany,"
ZEW Discussion Papers
06-19, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.
[Downloadable!]
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)