Why Deregulate Labour Markets?

‘This is an important and very useful book in summarizing and synthesizing a vast and disparate literature on this issue and clarifying some of the trade offs implicit in pursing the high or low road to flexibility and modernizing labour markets. It should provide a very useful resource for teaching for courses in the humanities and at business schools, as well as providing an important contribution to a debate that has not ended.’ -British Journal of Sociology ‘The arguments are delivered in a clear and systematic way. The book presents a good combination of general, comparative perspectives and a more in-depth presentation of national cases… keeps its distance from statistical macroeconomic approaches: it presents a lot of quantitative material, but also puts it in a social and political context.’ -Quarterly of the European Trade Union InstituteEurope’s mass unemployment and the call for extensive labour market de-regulation have, perhaps more than any other contemporary issue, impassioned political debate and academic research. With contributions from economists, political scientists and sociologists, Why Deregulate Labour Markets? takes a hard look at the empirical connections between unemployment and regulation in Europe today, utilizing both in-depth nation analyses and broader-based international comparisons.