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The subject of the paper ? European gender equality policy and its implementation in the United Kingdom and Germany ? provides a window on social policy making at the interface between EU and domestic politics. The paper examines the evolution of EU social policy in regard to gender equality in the labor market and analyzes how the British and German governments have implemented EU directives and EU guidelines of the European Employment Strategy into national legislation. The central question of the paper is twofold: How are policy input (EU directives and EU guidelines) and policy output (national legislation) linked differently in the UK and Germany? Under what conditions can welfare state resistance and resilience to reform be overcome in the traditional and new community methods? To explain variation in policy change through EU law the paper focuses on institutional and cognitive veto points and domestic actor strategies evolving around them. To achieve significant policy change through EU resources, i.e. change that does not leave domestic legislation predominantly intact, domestic political actor mobilization evolving around institutional veto points of the EU legal system or new cognitive veto points of the open method of co-ordination (OMC) are essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses an often neglected question in labor market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard employment? To explore these questions, the paper derives a detailed occupational scheme from the literature, capturing the variety of labor market outcomes within countries. In a second step, the scheme is theoretically linked to the topic of non-standard work. It is argued that different degrees of skill specificity across occupational groups produce diverging incentives for flexible and long-term employment, respectively. This leads to the expectation of (some) service-sector occupations showing stronger tendencies towards non-standard employment than those in the industrial sector. Based on European and German micro data, the categorization is used to decompose various labor market indicators. The results clearly demonstrate the unequal incidence of non-standard employment along the lines of the suggested categorization. Moreover, the longitudinal perspective suggests that traditionally functioning occupational groups will be crowded out by more destandardized ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1998 and 2001 Germany and Japan enacted pension and tax reforms as part of a broader effort to revive the economy and reduce unemployment. However, the German reform maintained fiscal discipline, a generous pension system (by increasing the role of private pensions), and passive labor market policy. In contrast, Japan resorted to deficit spending, while retrenching public pension and tailoring labor market policies to keep the elderly active. The recent reforms have reinforced the divergent policy paths of Germany and Japan, which can be explained by (a) the arrangements that facilitate coordinated wage moderation where the unions are intermediately strong or decentralized and (b) how different arrangements shape policies to reward wage moderation. By explaining the source of difference among the two top wage coordinated economies, this article cautions against analyses that treat Germany and Japan as similar regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]