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This paper critically reviews the growing literature on the relationship between India’s supposedly ‘restrictive’ labour laws and poor performance on a range of industrial and social indicators. I first summarize the main claims of this literature, and the construction of the indices that it uses to measure inter-state differences in labour regulation. I show, on the basis of a detailed textual analysis of the relevant laws, that the original authors made multiple errors in coding the legal provisions, and that later contributors to the literature misinterpreted the resulting indices as measures of labour market flexibility. I then highlight some econometric issues that undermine their findings, and the difficulties involved in replicating their analyses with a ‘corrected’ and updated indicator. In the course of this discussion, I briefly describe some very recent changes in the labour laws. I go on to point out some flaws in recent papers: they inaccurately capture the employment thresholds at which different sections of the law become applicable; they ignore reasons other than labour regulations for why firms choose to stay small; and they ignore other forms of flexible employment while creating a misleading dichotomy between contract workers and ‘permanent’ workers. I conclude by summarizing evidence of growing de facto flexibility in Indian industry and deteriorating labour market outcomes for workers, without any de jure changes in the regulatory framework.

This paper examines the prevalence of non-standard workers in EU-28, rules for accessing social security, and these workers’ risk of not being able to access it. It focuses on temporary and part-time workers, and the self-employed, and offers a particularly detailed analysis of their access to unemployment benefits. It focuses on eligibility, adequacy (net income replacement rates) and identifies those workers which are at the greatest risk of either not receiving benefits or receiving low benefits. It offers a special overview of foreign non-standard workers, who may be particularly vulnerable due to the absence of citizenship in the host country. The paper also analyses access to maternity and sickness benefits for these three groups of workers, as well as their access to pensions. Its key contribution is in bringing together the different dimensions of disadvantage that non-standard workers face vis-a-vis access to social protection. This allows us to comprehensively assess the adaptation of national social security systems across EU-28 to the changing world of work over the past 10 years. The paper shows that there is a lot of variation between the Member States, both in the structure of their social security systems, as well as the prevalence of non-standard work. Most notably, the paper concludes that: i) access to unemployment benefits is the most challenging component of welfare state provision for people in non-standard employment; ii) policy reforms vis-a-vis access to social benefits have improved the status of non-standard workers in several countries, while they have worsened it in others, particularly in Bulgaria, Ireland and Latvia; iii) some Eastern European countries can offer lessons to other Member States due to their experiences with labour market challenges during transition and the subsequent adaptations of their social security systems to greater labour market flexibility. The paper also implies that a country’s policy towards non- standard work cannot be examined in isolation from its labour market conditions, as well as its growth model, and that uniform policy solutions for non-standard work cannot be applied across EU-28.

This paper makes use of a natural experiment to examine effects of potential capital losses and general attractiveness of pension schemes on employees' propensity to change jobs. On January 1st 2004, the two largest pension funds in the Netherlands, for civil servants and for the health care sector, changed their pension scheme from a final salary to an average salary. This industry-leve change excludes the possibility that a negative correlation between having a job with an attractive pension scheme and the number of labour market transitions is driven by self-selection of workers into jobs with an attractive pension arrangement. Using individual data covering the entire Dutch population, we estimate discrete choice models for job-to-job transitions. The results show that the number of job transitions of civil servants significantly increased at the onset of the new pension rules. The changing pension rules affected the propensity to change jobs for individuals working in the health care sector only to a smaller extent.

In line with most of the developed world, the United Kingdom experienced in 2008-9 its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s: the Great Recession. But despite the 7.3% peak-totrough fall in real GDP the unemployment rate only rose from 5.2% to 8.4%. This muted response is often attributed to the flexibility of the UK labour market and, in particular, the willingness of UK workers to see their real wages fall. An alternative view is that the recession was driven by a large and negative productivity shock. This paper uses an estimated DSGE model of the UK economy to investigate these hypotheses, assessing which shocks were largely responsible for the Great Recession and the extent to which the effect of these shocks on unemployment would have been worse had the UK labour market responded less flexibly.