From the "planning euphoria" to the "bitter economic truth": The transmission of economic ideas into German labour market policies in the 1960s and 2000s

Stephan Pühringer and Markus Griesser

No Ök-30, Working Paper Serie des Instituts für Ökonomie from Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung (HfGG), Institut für Ökonomie

Abstract: This paper compares the interconnections between dominant economic thought and processes of policy-making in the area of labour market reforms in Germany in the late 1960s and the early 2000s. The transition in labour market policies in this period could be described as a change from an active to an activating approach. At the level of economic discourse these policy changes correspond to a paradigm shift from Keynesian to neoclassical/neoliberal economic thought. We investigated these changes by focussing on two distinct reforms of labour market policies and carried out a critical discourse analysis of the relevant public and academic discourse of economists. We find that the paradigm shift in economic thought was accompanied by a shift in economists' discourses on labour market policy issues.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis; political power of economic ideas; labour market policy reforms; economic expert discourse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 B21 B22 B52 J41 J53 J88 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/191716/1/wps-oek30.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:cuswps:oek30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Serie des Instituts für Ökonomie from Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung (HfGG), Institut für Ökonomie
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().