Jon Erik Dølvik - Böcker

This book analyzes the interaction of European social models - the institutions structuring labor markets' supply side - and their turbulent macroeconomic environment from the deep Europe-wide recession, ending Germany's post-unification boom, through monetary union's establishment, to the Great Recession following the recent financial crisis. The analysis reaches two conclusions challenging the dominant view that the social models caused unemployment by impairing labor markets' efficiency in the name of equity. First, the social models' employment and distributive effects are far outweighed by their macroeconomic environment, especially in the Eurozone, where its truncated structure of economic governance transformed the Great Recession into a sovereign debt crisis. Second, instead of a trade-off between efficiency and equity, the employment effects of counteracting markets' tendency to generate inequality depends on the macroeconomic conditions under which it occurs and how it is done.

Europeans use 'social models' to refer to the combination of welfare state, industrial relations, and educational institutions jointly structuring what we can think of as the supply-side of the labor market. The dominant view in controversy over the social models has been that in the name of equity they have impaired the labor market's efficiency, thereby causing unemployment. But doubt is cast on this supply-side-only diagnosis by powerful macroeconomic developments, from the Europe-wide recession following Germany's post-unification boom to the deepest economic crisis since the interwar Great Depression, which the Eurozone's truncated economic governance structure transformed into a sovereign debt crisis, threatening the Euro's and even EU's very survival. This book explores the interaction of Europe's diverse social models with the major developments that shaped their macroeconomic environment over the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It concludes that this environment rather than the social models are primarily responsible for the immense social costs of the crisis.