Federalism, Regionalism, and the Construction of Spaces

The Weimar Republic was a democratic and a federal state. The Reich had significantly more powers than it had had in Prussian-dominated Imperial Germany. Not only the Reich, but also the Länder (states) were structured democratically. Neither the plans for a reorganization of the Reich nor those for ending the dualism between the Reich and Prussia came to fruition. The unitarian leanings of the democrats ran against the will of the democratic state governments to assert themselves. The 1920 Reich Finance Reform reversed the course of fiscal federalism by creating a nationwide centralized system of taxation replacing the older Länder tax codes. The Reich and the Länder shared revenues which put the Länder at risk in the crisis after 1930. A range of economic, social, and cultural dynamics changed Germany’s spatial order. No longer were the Reich’s financial administration and unemployment-insurance system oriented toward state borders. The same applied to transport areas and tariff zones, which were oriented towards rationalization and optimization. The Heimat movement found the essence of the nation in an ethnically and culturally defined peoplehood, which brought it close to the völkisch movement. A sharp nationalism prevailed in the Heimat movement putting border regions more and more at the center of national imagination.

Distributive Consequences of Risk Privatization: The Case of the Swedish Unemployment Insurance System

The public unemployment insurance program in Sweden has retrenched in terms of its benefit generosity in the last three decades. As a response to this trend, in which an ever-smaller proportion of the previous income of unemployed persons is compensated by public unemployment insurance benefit, complementary income insurance schemes provided by unions have expanded rapidly in the last 15 years, currently covering one half of the working population. What does this change mean for people who need income protection upon unemployment and are more likely to find themselves unemployed or underemployed? By analyzing survey-based benefit recipiency data among retail workers who were unemployed in 2014, this article explores the outcomes of the multi-pillarized unemployment benefit provision system in Sweden. While public unemployment insurance benefit does not fully compensate for the income loss for the majority of retail workers, the promise of a complementary income insurance scheme seems to be illusory for many individuals as they repeatedly oscillate between precarious work and benefits, accompanied by the burden of navigating a complex system.

Lessons from the ongoing crisis for labour market institutions in Russia

The paper discusses the role of unemployment insurance system in economic development in general and in the context of the ongoing crisis due to the forced lockdown related to COVID-19. The key elements of employment subsidy programs with reduced working hours or partial unemployment benefits, based on the experience of OECD countries get special attention.

From looking backwards to forwards: unemployment insurance, France, 2000

Chapter 4 presents the reform process of the so-called PARE (‘aid plan for the return to employment’) of the French unemployment insurance system in 2000. The instruments of PARE included an individual contract that would oblige the unemployed to engage in ‘personalised’ job seeking activities while getting access to support such as training courses. Further, PARE strengthened requirements to accept job offers from the job exchange service as well as sanctions upon refusals and contractual infringements. The trade unions were divided in their stance towards this, causing intense debate, especially on the use of sanctions. The reform illustrates how the addition of a rather simple instrument radically changed the moral status of the unemployed.

Turning solutions into ‘structural’ problems: unemployment insurance, Denmark, 1992–93

Chapter 5 analyses the reform process ending with ‘The active labour market policy act’ (1992-93) of the Danish unemployment insurance system. The chapter explains how a number of instruments that were initially qualified to keep the existing normative principles alive became requalified and reshaped to activation. The reform introduced an individual contract in combination with it with a number of different instruments: leave schemes to ease access to the labour market, job training for the unemployed and job offers that the unemployed, after a period of time, would have to accept in order to continue to receive compensation.

Farewell flexicurity? Danish flexicurity and the crisis

Before the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, flexicurity topped the European labour market and social policy agenda. It was acclaimed for combining the flexibility of liberal labour markets with the security of social welfare states, thereby offering a viable formula for success in the new global economy. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in Denmark, with the Danish system repeatedly highlighted as a good example of flexicurity in action. In this article, we revisit the flexicurity concept, assessing how the Danish labour market came through the crisis. We argue that the economic crisis and especially political reforms of the unemployment insurance system have challenged the institutional complementarities of flexicurity, but that the Danish labour market is recovering and adapting to new challenges. The Danish case illustrates that institutional complementarities between flexibility and security are fragile and liable to disintegrate if the institutions providing flexicurity are not maintained and supported.