Have Europe’s labour markets become more flexible? An exercise in measuring the relative flexibility of wages across countries and time

Wage and price flexibility, and the structural and institutional reforms required to induce this kind of flexibility, have now become the leading economic issue in Europe. This is not a new development. It has long been argued that structural reforms were a necessary condition for a successful monetary union (Delors, 1989). Nor has this gone unrecognised within Europe itself. The Lisbon Agenda, agreed in 2000, was introduced precisely to create greater market flexibility. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.