Employment and wage flexibility under integration. DECD countries study, 1970-2002.

Employment and wage flexibility under integration. DECD countries study, 1970-2002.

As far as the ED enlargement is concerned, restructuring of the European labour markets that will take place in the near future seems to be a very important issue. The issue is strictly related to labour market flexibility. According to some labour economists, such traditional labour concerns as unionization, minimum wage legislation, and health and labour codes have become irrelevant or even harmful for the European labour markets (Blanchard O., Jimeno J., Sachs J., Svejnar J., 2002). Therefore, now sustained reductions in unemployment rates require new approaches emphasizing modem and wide understanding of labour market flexibility (Snower D., 1999). There are four well-known approaches towards labour market flexibility (Adnett N., 1996; Sollow R. M., 1998): employment flexibility, labour mobility, wage flexibility and flexibility of working time. In our paper we compare employment and wage flexibility in different groups of countries, the ED members, those accessing the ED (with a special attention paid to Poland) and other OECD ones. In our paper we examine if and how the employment and wage flexibility characteristics are diversified within the analyzed country groups and we try to give some reasoning(doing some case studies) for variation of employment and wage flexbility charateristics.