Reforming Severance Pay

Termination pay includes severance, mass redundancy, or end-of-service pay and is widely used as income protection for the unemployed. This book reviews such arrangements wordwide, analyzing their performance and recent reform trends to improve efficiency and redistributive impact.

This report evaluates the comprehensive labour market reforms undertaken in Portugal in 2011-15. It reviews reforms in employment protection legislation, unemployment benefits, activation, collective bargaining, minimum wages and working time, and assesses the available evidence on their impact.

In recent years the countries of southern Europe have undergone, with varying intensity, a serious and prolonged economic crisis. Most have had to implement comprehensive economic adjustment programmes, including a wide range of structural reforms. Economic Crisis and Structural Reforms in Southern Europe examines these reforms, drawing policy lessons from their successes and failures. This book employs two basic strands of analysis: issues of policy design, and political economy considerations. It considers the choice of timing and sequencing of reforms, the choice of the appropriate policy instruments, the pressure of interest groups and the political calculations involved in reforms. Featuring chapters in which contributors explore both national cases of specific structural reforms, and a comparative approach in order to evaluate similar reforms across countries, this important and topical work explores ongoing issues within the economy. Focusing on the challenges of designing and implementing structural reforms under conditions of crisis, this book will be of interest to policy makers and researchers from national and international organizations as well as academics and members of research institutes interested in the economics and politics of the Eurozone crisis.

Focusing on the perspectives of policy-makers, the book's purpose is to closely examine the factors that make for successful/unsuccessful labor market related policy reforms. The aim is to reveal the political aspects, namely the chances, challenges and impediments to designing labor market reforms and to establish the conditions under which successful labor market reforms can be advocated, adopted and implemented (process). The work includes exclusive interviews with twelve former European prime ministers about the labour market reforms they initiated in their respective countries: Wolfgang Schüssel Anders Fogh Rasmussen Andrus Ansip François Fillon Gerhard Schröder Georgios Papandreou Mario Monti Jan Peter Balkenende Jerzy Buzek Iveta Radicová Luis Rodríguez Zapatero Tony Blair

Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation. Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers. Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.

With the aim to provide guidelines for countries wishing to introduce or improve income support systems for the unemployed, the book summarizes the evidence about the performance of five such systems: unemployment insurance, unemployment assistance, unemployment insurance savings accounts, severance pay, and public works. These systems are evaluated by two sets of criteria: (i) performance criteria, evaluating how well these systems work A? how they protect incomes and what other, particularly efficiency related, effects they may have; and (ii) design and implementation criteria, evaluating how these systems fit the country A? how suitable are these programs given country-specific conditions, chief among them being labor market and other institutions, the capacity needed for administering income support programs, the size of the informal sector, and prevalence of private transfers. Income Support Systems for the Unemployed also offers summary evaluations of alternative systems by describing the strengths and weaknesses of each system and pointing out the country specific circumstances which are particularly conducive to performance.

Offers an analysis of the political process involved in the reform of the pension systems in European countries.