"We survey the recent literature on the effects of active labor market policies on individual labor market outcomes like employment and income, for adult female individuals without work in European countries. We consider skill-training programs, monitoring and sanctions, job search assistance, and employment subsidies. The results are remarkably uniform across studies. We relate the results to the relevant level of female labor force participation"--Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit web site.
Measures of Active Labor Market Policy - such as training, wage subsidies, public employment measures, and job search assistance - are widely used in European countries to combat unemployment. This study provides novel insight on this important policy issue by discussing the role of the European Commission's Employment Strategy, reviewing the experiences made in European states, and giving the first ever quantitative assessment of the existing cross-country evidence.
With an aging population and declining productivity growth, Europe faces serious challenges to raising its output growth. Adding to these challenges are the various gender gaps in the labor market. Despite significant progress in recent decades, there are still fewer women than men participating in Europe’s labor market, and women are more likely to work part time. Furthermore, a smaller share of women reaches the top rungs of the corporate ladder. Could greater gender equality in the labor market help mitigate the slowdown in Europe’s growth potential? Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the drivers of female labor force participation in Europe as well as what effects greater gender diversity in senior corporate positions might have for Europe’s economic performance. Reexamining the factors driving women’s labor force participation is particularly important because in many European countries the process of closing the gender gap has stalled despite greater gender equality in human capital investment, declining birth rates, changing social norms, and equal legal access to employment opportunities. Investigating whether firm performance could be improved if women held a greater share of senior positions is also essential given that the empirical evidence from past research into this question has been inconclusive.
This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date study of the contribution of women and men to changing European economic activity patterns covering all fifteen member states. Based on the work of the European Commission's network of experts on women's employment, it draws on both national and European data sources. The book links trends in the structures of employment with new comparative data on the role of systems of welfare provision in order to explore economic activity patterns by gender. Participation patterns of women still vary widely within Europe, so much attention is paid to the institutions - both in the labour market and welfare - which help to explain these variations.
The outcome of three years of research on the role of institutions in labor markets at the research unit Labor Market Policy and Employment of the Social Science Research Center Berlin, these seven contributions were originally presented at a conference in December 1992 before a group of experts i
Using panel data for 15 industrial countries, active labor market policies (ALMPs) are shown to have raised employment rates in the business sector in the 1990s, after controlling for many institutions, country-specific effects, and economic variables. Among such policies, direct subsidies to job creation were the most effective. ALMPs also affected employment rates by reducing real wages below levels allowed by technological growth, changes in the unemployment rate, and institutional and other economic factors. However, part of this wage moderation may be linked to a composition effect because policies were targeted to low-paid individuals. Whether ALMPs are cost-effective from a budgetary perspective remains to be determined, but they are certainly not substitutes for comprehensive institutional reforms.
Covering employment and wage gender gaps, participation of women, fertility, and the welfare of children, this insightful volume discusses how the trend towards greater participation of women in labour markets interacts with gender differences in pay. It focusses on the scope for increasing the number of women in the labour force without negatively affecting the development of their children. The need for this volume has become self evident. At the Spring 2000 Lisbon meeting of the European Council the Heads of Governments of the EU agreed to accelerate the greater participation of women in the labour market. However, neither in Lisbon nor in the subsequent Spring European Councils of the EU was it discussed how to achieve this target - and the trade-offs that would be involved in increasing the participation of women in paid employment. Policies for increasing participation must involve some losers, or they would already have been implemented everywhere. If distributional considerations and policy trade-offs are ignored, it is only possible to set virtual targets, neglecting the reforms needed to achieve them. This book sets out a better informed policy debate about these issues, paving the way to more realistic targets and ways to achieve them.
"Whether or not labor market rigidities are an important contributor to persistently high levels of unemployment remains at the center of an important debate in Europe. European labor markets are often viewed as rigid and inflexible in opposition to those in North America where legislation is less protective and fosters more mobility. This paper shows that the labor market policies adopted by Central and Eastern European countries, aspiring to join the European Union, do not appear excessively rigid. However, significant and wide- ranging economic reform programs make it difficult to assess the impact of labor market institutions."
