How can competitiveness be achieved in post-crisis Europe: deregulating employment relations or enhancing high performance work practices?
基于欧洲企业调查数据，研究发现雇佣关系制度与生产率提升无负相关，而高绩效工作实践显著促进生产率，挑战了放松规制的 neoliberal 政策。
The recent Eurozone crisis has reinvigorated neoliberal policies and brought to the fore an academic and policy debate over the deregulation of employment relations’ institutions ‘in the name of competitiveness’. In the context of this debate, we ask the following question: have firms with employment relations institutions been less able to improve productivity during the crisis? We consider this question by examining data from the European Company Survey. We also look into different models of capitalism to gauge whether there are context-specific institutional effects that may mediate firm-level outcomes. Contrary to the dominant neoliberal discourse, we do not find any strong evidence that employment relations institutions are negatively associated with productivity increases. Instead, we find that certain high performance work practices are positively and significantly associated with productivity increases across EU-15 and in particular institutional contexts. Taken together these results challenge the neoliberal ‘low road’ policies that are focused on dismantling employment relations institutions and suggest shifting the attention towards context-sensitive ‘high road’ policies and practices.