Euro-Productivity and Euro-Jobs Since the 1960s: Which Institutions Mattered?

How have labor market institutions and welfare-state transfers affected jobs and productivity in Europe? Many studies have tackled this question, with mixed results. This paper proposes an eclectic approach and gives a clearer answer to the issue. Orthodox criticisms of European government institutions are right in some cases and wrong in others. Labor-market policies such as employment protection laws have become more costly since 1980 through their human-capital cost of protecting senior male workers at the expense of women and youth. Product-market regulations may have reduced GDP, though the evidence is less robust. However, high taxes have shed the negative influence they had in the 1960s and 1970s, and other welfare-state institutions have caused no net harm to European jobs and growth. Coordinated wage bargaining has saved jobs with no cost in productivity. The welfare state's tax-based social transfers and even unemployment benefits have not clearly harmed employment or GDP.