The chapter offers an overview of existing programs, examines their historic development, assesses their economic rationale, and describes some recent major reform attempts. It also develops and empirically tests three hypotheses about the economic rationale of the program: (1) that severance pay is a primitive income protection program; (2) that it is an efficiency-enhancing human resource instrument; and (3) that it is a job protection instrument. The chapter also reviews recent reforms in Austria, Chile, Italy, and the Republic of Korea.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4464087
Labour market problems, associated with the institutional characteristics of the labour market, hinder functioning of the labour market and inhibit economic growth. The study aims to 1) analyze labour taxation in Slovenia compared to OECD and EU Member States and to asses the impact of tax wedge on employment growth in the EU and Slovenia; 2) examine the possibility of reforming Slovenian system of severance pay, present a conceptual model of reform and to asses its effects; and 3) investigate how do Slovenia and EU Member States comply with the concept of flexicurity and implement flexicurity policies and to examine the effect of flexibility and security in the labour market on labour productivity in the EU. Empirical analyses, which mainly include the period after 2000, are based on descriptive statistics, hierarchical classification methods, discriminant analysis, principal component analysis methods, and linear and panel regression models.
COBISS.SI-ID: 264548352
The paper assesses characteristics of labour taxation, employment and unemployment rate in the OECD and in the EU Member States and analyses relationship between tax wedge and labour market outcomes, i.e., employment and unemployment rate. The empirical analysis shows that the non-EU OECD countries are, on average, characterised with lower labour taxation than the EU OECD countries. Moreover, with regard to employment and unemployment rate, OECD and EU Member States can be classified in three groups, by which countries with lower unemployment and higher employment rate have, on average, lower tax wedge at all studied wage levels, and vice versa. The detrimental effect of tax wedge on labour market outcomes was also confirmed by the panel regression analyses performed on the sample of 38 countries over the 2000-2009 period. The empirical findings therefore suggest that policies of further reduction of labour taxation would have a stimulating effect on sustainable labour market performance, especially among countries with higher labour taxation levels.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4435415