Unemployment divergence and coordinated systems of industrial relations

Ever since the re-emergence of mass unemployment in the 1970s, the question of why some countries do better on the labour market than others has fascinated social scientists and policy makers. This study reviews the main contributions to the literature on crossnational unemployment divergence and offers an original explanatory framework which is applied to six countries: Japan, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Following David Soskice, these countries are considered as having coordinated systems of industrial relations. His framework is then extended by working out the implications of coordination for wage setting and by making a distinction between exclusive and inclusive forms of coordination in industrial relations. The case studies contain material on the developments of wages, employment, economic policy and industrial relations.