Labour market flexibility and policy coordination in a monetary union

Anssi Rantala

No 11/2003, Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland

Abstract: Sufficiently flexible labour markets are considered an important precondition for countries to benefit from membership in the monetary union.Economic policy coordination within the European Community is extensive and includes issues related to labour market structures.In this paper we study the determination of flexibility of the labour market and, ultimately, of wages in a member country of the monetary union.As a starting point, the analysis assumes that each country's government, in formulating its labour market policy, decides the degree of nominal wage flexibility in light of the fact that this involves political costs that increase with the degree of wage flexibility.The study then focuses on the effects of monetary union membership on each country's prospects for coordination of economic policies - specifically labour market policies.The study shows that coordination of labour market policies contributes to greater nominal wage flexibility in member countries.However, coordination of labour market policies will be effective only if unemployment is persistent or under discretionary monetary policy.From the perspective of macroeconomic stability, there is no particular need for coordinating labour market policies among member countries if the common central bank can credibly precommit to a low inflation target or if fluctuations in unemployment are white noise.

Keywords: wage flexibility; economic policy coordination; credibility; precommitment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E52 E58 E61 J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/211944/1/bof-rdp2003-011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bofrdp:rdp2003_011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().