"This survey highlights the key results of the empirical literature concerning the costs of flexibility enhancing reforms in product and labour markets. The documented costs include reduced employment, loss of government revenue, undesirable distributional consequences and political instability. The literature suggests that: i) once implemented, product and labour market reforms affect prices and quantities quite rapidly; ii) there are no major differences between the overall effects in the short and long run; iii) the costs of reforms are very much related to interactions with other policies and institutions; and iv) the costs of reforms change over the business cycle.

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/the-costs-of-flexibility-enhancing-structural-reforms_5jrs558c5r5f.pdf?contentType=%2fns%2fWorkingPaper&itemId=%2fcontent%2fworkingpaper%2f5jrs558c5r5f-en&mimeType=application%2fpdf&containerItemId=%2fcontent%2fworkingpaperseries%2f18151973&accessItemIds=



Negotiating Reforms in the Public Services: Trajectories of New Public Management Policies in the Swedish and French Police Forces

The paper addresses the effect of governmental policy styles and trade union strategies in the implementation of organizational reforms inspired by New Public Management in the Swedish and French police forces over the years 1999-2013. By tracing the discourse in editorials of internal news magazines published by the ministry of the interior and by the trade unions representing the police forces, we reconstruct the negotiation process and the positions taken by the bargaining partners in the reform initiatives. Highlighting parallels and differences between the reforms in Sweden and France we contrast the consensual policy style of a top administration detached from political influences facing a unified trade union in Sweden with the confrontational policy style of a highly intertwined administrative and political elite facing a fragmented trade union movement in France. As a result, reforms in Sweden were piecemeal but continuous and unidirectional while they were more radical but moving back and forth in France."

Support: Digital