The Political Economy of Labour Market Liberalization in high-income countries:
The Political Economy of Labour Market Liberalization in high-income countries:
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OSC Scientific Seminar 2020-2021
Friday, 6st November 2020, 11:30 am / 1 pm (Zoom videoconference)
The Political Economy of Labour Market Liberalization in high-income countries:
Can We Still Talk About Varieties?
Federico Filetti
PhD Student, Sciences Po - OSC & LIEPP
This presentation is based on a paper writen with Emanuelle Ferragina. Our aim is to analyse the tension between the existence of specific Varieties of Labour Market Protection and the presence of common liberalization patterns across 21 high-income countries between 1990 and 2015.
On the one hand, literatures on Varieties of Capitalism and Worlds of Welfare identified country clusters (or regimes) resulting from different institutional configurations. On the other, widespread liberalization processes have put into question their inter-temporal resilience.
Kathleen Thelen bridged this tension theorising three liberalization trajectories across different institutional regimes. In this context, we empirically investigate whether Varieties of Capitalism and Worlds of Welfare are still accurate heuristic frameworks capturing specific country-patterns of labour market protection, and whether liberalization processes come into varieties.
We provide three contributions to the literature.
First, to move away from the increasingly unrealistic Average Production Worker-assumption, we measure the level of protection against labour market risks employing four categories of indicators: employment protection, unemployment protection, income maintenance and activation policies. We account also for the heterogeneity of the labour force considering separately the level of protection for typical and atypical workers.
Second, we test the existence of Varieties of Labour Market Protection and their over-time variation using Principal Component Analysis in order to empirically capture the intrinsic multidimensionality of labour market
protection.
Third, through the construction of a ‘liberalization score’, we precise and expand Thelen’s insights, measuring the trajectories and intensity of liberalization processes occurring in high-income countries over 25 years.
We find that both Varieties of Capitalism and Worlds of Welfare typologies are useful interpretative frameworks to understand labour market dynamics in 1990. However, under the liberalization processes Worlds of Welfare framework lost most of its explanatory capacity in 2015. Moreover, we confirm the trend towards greater liberalization and identify four country- trajectories: “the liberalizers”, “the dualizers”, “the flexecuritizers” and “the hybrids”.
