Tag: Policy evaluation

Making the case for LMIC to be partners in the global solution for COVID-19

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By Kaouthar Lbiati

The growing success of efforts to contain the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, may present yet another hurdle – How to end lockdown without causing a second wave? There is no modern analog for the shutdown of economic activity. Ending the lockdown needs unparalleled capabilities in testing, tracing and most importantly it needs researchers to deliver a new vaccine!

Lockdown
Source: https://wendyedavis.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/lockdown.jpg

This paper makes the case for low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to be part of the clinical evaluation of the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 future vaccine, the ramping up of regional manufacturing capabilities for local immunization and underscores the critical importance of reaching an advanced purchase agreement with manufacturers and suppliers as well as building up multilateral financial partnerships with key institutions before even a vaccine is made available in either North America, Asia and/or Europe.

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Collective bargaining in Southern Europe: Quo vadis?

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By Prof. Pedro Martins
#collectivebargaining #extensions #microdata #policyevaluation #socialdialogue #EuropeanUnion #collectiveagreements #employment #wages #inequality

This note summarises the research presented in a policy workshop held last week in Brussels. The studies were conducted under the ‘Economic Analysis of Collective Bargaining Extensions’ (CoBExt) project, funded by the European Union, and focused on the cases of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

collective-bargaining
Source: https://www.nuj.org.uk/news/collective-bargaining/

In my introduction, I presented a comparison of collective bargaining (CB) across the four countries. Despite generally low trade union density rates, particularly in the private sector, these countries exhibit very high CB coverage, precisely because of widespread and nearly automatic (explicit or implicit) extensions. The exceptions to these practices were Greece and Portugal but only during their adjustment programmes, when extensions were entirely suspended (Greece) or made conditional on representativeness criteria similar to other EU Member States (Portugal). In Greece, firm-level CB agreements were also boosted through the suspension of the favourability principle, which allowed for greater differentiation in working conditions across firms.

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