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Ronald Janssen

Ronald Janssen is working as economic policy adviser at the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC).

Ronald Janssen

Decentralised Collective Bargaining: Oversold

Ronald Janssen 19th July 2018

Many international economic institutions share the idea that collective bargaining should take place at the level of individual companies. For example, the OECD, as far back as its 1994 Jobs Strategy, pushed for more firm level bargaining by insisting that the instrument of administrative extension of collective agreements to all firms within a given sector […]

OECD Meets Piketty: An Alternative Economic Narrative

Ronald Janssen 20th June 2018

Today’s profits are not tomorrow’s investments A picture can say more than a thousand words. This is certainly true for the set of graphs (see below) that the OECD published in its latest Economic Outlook and that show the rate of return on fixed assets – a proxy measure for the rate of profitability on […]

How The OECD Wants To Make Globalisation Work For All

Ronald Janssen 21st September 2017

Worried by the populist backlash against globalisation, a big crowd of ministers, politicians and economists participated last June in the annual OECD week in Paris to discuss how to make globalisation work for everyone. While a multitude of panels and presentations stressed the benefits of economic openness and trade, the papers and publications which the […]

Has The OECD Joined The Campaign For Higher Wages?

Ronald Janssen 7th June 2017

Weak wages produce a weak recovery Trade unions tend to see wages not as a factor of competitiveness but as an engine that drives demand, growth and jobs. The Economic Outlook published this week by the OECD supports this view as it explains the lacklustre economic that is going on via the stagnation of wage […]

The OECD And Job Protection: New Findings But Old Policy Recipes On ‘Your Wage Or Your Job’

Ronald Janssen 7th July 2016

One of the key findings from the 2016 Employment Outlook just released by the OECD is that easier firing does not create jobs. Moreover, the OECD also finds that loosening job protection in the middle of an economic downturn results in immediate and substantial job losses. However, instead of cautioning policy makers against the danger […]

Central Banks Warm To Collective Bargaining

Ronald Janssen 30th March 2016

Something peculiar is happening. Up until recently, many central bankers were looking at robust collective bargaining and wage formation systems as a possible source for inflationary wage developments. Indeed, central banks, and the ECB in particular, have on numerous occasions called for more flexible and decentralised (read: weakened) wage bargaining systems so as to remove […]

Break The Vicious Circle Of Falling Prices And Wages

Ronald Janssen 27th January 2016

The IMF has recently released its latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) Update pointing to persistently weak growth and another downward revision of its projected growth rates for 2016 and 2017 by 0.2 percentage points in each year. Despite this, the IMF’s growth trajectory still sees the world economy recovering slightly from the weakness it experienced […]

How Germany Gains From The Euro While Others Pay

Ronald Janssen 27th September 2015

The ‘non-paper’ which Wolfgang Schäuble presented to his fellow finance ministers at a recent ECOFIN council in Luxemburg (leaked by the Handelsblatt newspaper) represents something of a paradox. One of its main ideas is that the euro area lacks a procedure that could declare member states bankrupt when having lost access to financial markets. This […]

The German Minimum Wage Is Not A Job Killer

Ronald Janssen 9th September 2015

Mainstream economists excel in scaremongering about the dismal effects any policy that tries to correct market forces may have on economic performance. By arguing that such a policy will destroy jobs, things are even turned upside down. Because of the presumed job losses, social policy suddenly becomes anything but social while liberal economic policy is […]

Democracy And Monetary Union: How Not To Do It

Ronald Janssen 1st July 2015

With the showdown between the “institutions” and Greece catching the headlines of policy discussions across Europe, the publication of the report on completing Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has almost been lost from sight. The report, signed this time by five presidents including the President of the European Parliament, raises several interesting issues ranging from […]

Labour Market Deregulation and Productivity: IMF Finds No Link

Ronald Janssen 15th April 2015

New research by IMF staff has found there is no evidence that reforms that deregulate labour markets have any positive impact on increasing the economy’s growth potential. As labour market deregulation has been a key ingredient in the IMF and troika’s financial bail-out programmes in several European member states, this raises serious questions about the […]

European Economic Governance And Flawed Analysis

Ronald Janssen 16th March 2015

Getting Stupid Capital Flows Off The Hook The analytical note on the next steps for better economic governance that was published mid- February during the informal European Council reopens the discussion on how to obtain a strict coordination of national economic policy making in the Euro Area. Or, to put it more bluntly, how to […]

How To Improve The ECB’s QE Programme

Ronald Janssen 28th January 2015

With up to €60 bn of debt a month being bought for the next 19 months, the ECB’s programme of quantitative easing (QE) is massive. But its programme suffers from three major shortcomings (see below). These shortcomings imply that the ECB’s QE programme, even if it does represent a major leap, needs serious redesigning. It […]

Why Austerity Is Contagious

Ronald Janssen 27th October 2014

Austerity is contagious: The case of France France is finding itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, with 54% of companies reporting in the third quarter 2014 that they find activity constrained by a lack of customers, the main problem is clearly on the side of demand. On the other […]

Lessons From 15 Years Of Japanese Deflation

Ronald Janssen 12th September 2014

While Mario Draghi has stolen the show with his speech at Jackson Hole, another speech by Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan, is actually even more interesting. Kuroda’s introductory remarks are short and simple and they concern the 15 years of deflation Japan has experienced since the mid-nineties. The key lesson is that a […]

Europe Does Not Understand Deflation And Wages

Ronald Janssen 15th July 2014

Led by the IMF, the main body of mainstream economists is now aware of the danger that debt deflation is raising for several Euro Area member states. This awareness is surely a good thing. However, what is conspicuously absent in this discussion is the link with wages. It is as if ‘lowflation’ (as the IMF […]

DG ECFIN And The Missing Greek Exports

Ronald Janssen 2nd July 2014

Economists at DG ECFIN are starting to notice something we have pointed out already some time ago: Despite an enormous cut in wage costs, Greek exports have firmly stayed put in recessionary territory and hopes for an export-led recovery have proven to be illusive. Troubled by this failure of Greek exports to lift off, DG ECFIN […]

European Wage Depression Since 1999

Ronald Janssen 30th May 2014

Probably one of the most popular slogans of the entire European Semester is the catchphrase that wages should be aligned with productivity. The reason for its popularity is that this phrase can be used with a lot of flexibility. On the one hand, the Commission can make use of it to discipline wages and undermine […]

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


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Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

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What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


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Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


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ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


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