Fighting Unemployment The Limits of Free Market Orthodoxy

With much of Europe plagued by high levels of unemployment, it has become widely accepted that the culprit is labor market rigidity and that the prescription can only be labor market deregulation: lower wages, higher earnings inequality, greater decentralization in bargaining, less generousunemployment benefits, more hiring flexibility, and less job security. Fighting Unemployment critically assesses this free market orthodoxy. With cross-country statistical analyses and country case studies, leading economists from seven North American and European countries contend that thisconventional wisdom has greatly exaggerated the extent to which the unemployment problem can be blamed on protective labor market institutions and that the case for dismantling the welfare state to fight unemployment rests more on free market ideology than on the empirical evidence. The largermessage of this book is that fundamentally different labor market models - ranging from the 'American Model' to the much more regulated and coordinated Scandinavian systems - are compatible with low unemployment.

David Howell, is Associate Dean and Professor of economics and public policy at the Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University (New York City). He also teaches in the Economics Department of the Graduate Faculty and is a Research Associate at the University's Center for Economic Policy Analysis (CEPA). His recent published work has addressed wage inequality in the United States, unemployment across OECD countries and the labor market implications of immigration in U.S. cities.