This paper analyses the determinants of household farms’ participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households’ management ability, land endowment, land quality and prices, transaction costs in the land market, rural credit and labour market constraints. We t...

The article proposes an analysis of labour markets and related social policy that corrects the supply-side emphasis that has dominated economic policy since the decline of Keynesian approaches in the late 1970s. It starts from a potential tension between the apparent need of economies for both flexible workers and confident consumers. This can be resolved through three different approaches: sep...

We study the relationship between ethnic identity and labour market outcomes of non-EU immigrants in Europe. Using the European Social Survey, we find that there is a penalty to be paid for immigrants with a strong identity. Being a first generation immigrant leads to a penalty of about 17% while secondgeneration immigrants have a probability of being employed that is not statistically differen...

According to conventional wisdom internationally mobile capital should not be taxed or should be taxed at a lower rate than labour. An important underlying assumption behind this view is that there are no market imperfections, in particular that labour markets clear competitively. At least for Europe, which has been suffering from high unemployment for a long time, this assumption does not seem...

The Unexpected Appearance of a New German Model Most Continental European labour markets and welfare states underwent a substantial transformation over the last two decades moving from a situation of low employment and limited labour market inequality to higher employment, but also more inequality. Germany is a case in point as it exhibits growing employment figures and growing shares of low pa...

This paper addresses labour market aspects of new immigrants in host countries with a specific emphasis on the Netherlands. In general, it can be stated that in the Netherlands immigrant groups have not been absorbed very wel1 in the labour market and that to some extent the dual labour market approach is applicable to the Dutch situation. Furthermore, future labour market developments in weste...

After more than a decade of deregulation and incorporation into global markets, access to the South African wine industry and ‘empowerment’ remain difficult. The government’s land reform policy notwithstanding, it is very difficult to gain entry into the industry, especially on the upstream side. Given the capital, technology and knowledge intensity of the industry, it is not easy to establish ...

Rapid trade liberalisation can exert profound effects on labour markets. Domestic firms, to sustain competitiveness for survival, could react through cutting labour benefits to achieve cost reductions. Alternatively, trade liberalisation may alter the industry composition of firms changing the aggregate formality rates. This paper studies the relationship between trade liberalisation and inform...