Politika zamestnanosti vo vyspelých ekonomikách v podmienkach globalizácie
EMPLOYMENT POLICY IN DEVELOPED ECONOMIES IN THE GLOBALIZATION CONDITION

Summary/Abstract: A dramatically different development in employment and its considerably differentiated structural interrelation with the overall dynamism of the economic growth, to compare the European Union member countries and the USA are an object of frequent analyses and of intensive economical-and-political discussions. Despite a massive start of global trends in the world economy during the post-indu-strial era, and thus despite of a significant dynamic chance to transfer particular produc-tion factors also between particular institutionalized blocks of the most developed mar-ket economies, the symmetrically inverse development of employment and of unem-ployment to compare the EU and the USA is a remarkable phenomenon. While in 1960 the average rate of unemployment in the EU countries represented only about 1.4 %, in 1999 it was more than 7 %. In contrary, in the USA it went down as of the end of 1999 to 3.3 %, that means practically to the level of the year 1960, and it was less than a half of the level recorded in 1983 when the USA achieved historical maximum values (about 7 %). Even more important were findings that in the USA the employment growth (and unemployment decline) from 1984 was accompanied by a dramatic increase in house-holds’ participation on the labour market. The participation reached in 1999 as much as 74.6 % out of the total number of the population to compare 61 % reached in 1960. In contrary, a total rate of the work activity of the EU countries population declined in the period of 1960–1999 by more than 5 % (from 64.6 % to 59.4 %). In this context our article has focused to identify major structural and institutional rigidities and economic-and-political inconsistency of the employment development and of the labour market policy in the EU as a whole, and also on the level of single member states. In compatibility with that the authors attempted to specify the character and weight of particular factors, by which the European employment policies differ from the existing institutional-and-allocation adjustment in the USA labour market functioning. However, they first specified several most important structural factors, which mostly and in a long-term negatively impacted the employment, the total rate of work partici-pation, as well as the unemployment in the EU countries. The factors are mainly as follows: • already mentioned the total massive decline in the rate of participation on the EU labour market in the past 40 years, that was, except for other factors, stimulated also by a relatively de-motivated level of social aid and of unemployment benefits, as well as by the above standard comfort of the labour legislation; • relatively lower share of the employment in the EU tertiary sector (service sector) to compare the USA, where the service sector worked at the most important accelerator for generating new work places during the past 10 years; ...

• Details
• Contents