Bedenkingen rond het tewerkstellingsbeleid in België
Abstract
Reflections about the unemployment policy in Belgium - Since the first oil shock Belgium has been confronted with a high and persistent unemployment, which mainly affects women and younger and lowly-educated employees. The problem is most acute in the French speaking part of the country. Unemployment can be due to an ill-working labour market (’classical unemployment’), or to an insufficient goods demand (’Keynesian unemployment’). Whereas classical unemployment can be eliminated through wage moderation, Keynesian unemployment has to be solved by stimulating goods demand. In Belgium the latter can be achieved by low wages as wages determine the Belgian competitiveness on foreign markets. In the seventies the Belgian government followed a Keynesian policy, even after the goods demand had recovered. This caused a tremendous government budget deficit and very high real wages. The government was forced to cut down expenditure and to pursue a stringent income policy in the eighties. This policy has been continued in the nineties, especially after the Maastricht agreement was signed in December 1991. Notwithstanding the low growth figures of the economy, government gives priority to budget control and wage policy, making the Keynesian unemployment problem worse. The recent employment policy concentrates on preserving the competitiveness of the Belgian economy and on structural rigidity on the labour market. Measures are taken for groups that are specially affected by unemployment (the younger and lowly-educated), to enhance the employment chances of these groups. As high unemployment is nowadays mainly caused by a lack of growth (Keynesian unemployment), we cannot expect very good results from these measures in the short run.
How to Cite:
Goubert, L., (1997) “Bedenkingen rond het tewerkstellingsbeleid in België”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 42(4), 432–447. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95285
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