Industrial Relations Systems and Macro-Economic Performance

In the first section, the paper presents a brief review of the existing literature on the link between the main features of industrial relations systems and macroeconomic performance (growth, productivity, unemployment) and derives a number of alternative and complementary hypotheses to be tested for the period starting with the year 2000. The second section uses a combination of different datasets (AMECO of DG ECFIN, ICTWSS, and the Eurofound's ECS various waves) to test the hypotheses for both individual EU countries and cluster of countries, grouped according to a specific cluster analysis run on the same basic industrial relations variables. The final section presents the results and provides indications for further research.