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The Dutch model: an obvious candidate for the ‘third way’?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2010

Anton Hemerijck  and
Jelle Visser
Anton Hemerijck
Affiliation:
Erasmus University (Rotterdam).
Jelle Visser
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam).
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Extract

The ‘Dutch model’ has become a catchphrase for progressive European politicians pondering the possibilities of a ‘third way’ between Anglo-American deregulation of labour markets and the bloated stagnation of European dirigiste economies. Foreign politicians, central bankers and union leaders alike praise the combination of fiscal conservatism, wage moderation, consensual welfare reform, job creation and the maintainance of overall social security. They highlight the extraordinary proportion of Dutch people, male and female, in part-time jobs; the sustained policy of wage moderation by the trade unions; the success in holding the course for EMU and the absence of social unrest. Best of all, they observe, the Netherlands is the only EU member state to have more than halved its unemployment rate during the past decade, from 13-plus per cent in 1983 to just over 5 per cent in 1998. Its annual growth rate in jobs of 1.6 per cent is four times the European average, and as good as the American ‘job machine’, but without the US' sharp increase in earning inequality and life-chances.

Type
Europeana
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , May 2001 , pp. 221 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 2001

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References

(1) In Le Monde of 23 January 1997; see also: Le modele hollandais, Le Monde of 2 December 1996; Le bonheur est dans les tulipes…, the title story of Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 October 1996; and more critical: Miracle ou Mirage aux Pays-Bas, Le Monde Diplomatique of July 1997.

(2) The expression ‘Groβer kleiner Nachbar’ was used by the Cologne-based Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft in its weekly bulletin of 25 July 1996; see also Jagoda, Bernhard, the president of the Federal Labour Market Board, Modell Niederlande-Ein Vorbild für Deutschland?, Wirtschaftsdienst. Zeitschrift für Wirschaftspolitik (Hamburg, Instituí für Wirtschaftsforschung), vol. 77Google Scholar, no. 4 (April 1997). A detailed Dutch-German comparison of labour market developments and policies is presented by Günther Schmid, one of the directors of the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin, in his ‘Beschäftigungswunder Niederlande. Ein Vergleich der Beschäftigungssysteme in den Niederlanden und in Deutschland’, Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum, discussion paper FS I 96–206 (also in English as ‘The Dutch Employment Miracle’, discussion paper FS I 97–202)

(3) Interviews with Flemish Economics Minister, Eric van Rompuy: ‘We must mirror ourselves to Holland’, and with Belgian Employment Minister Miep Smit, ‘Follow the Dutch example, but not blindly‘, De Standaard of 11 October 1996. See also the discussion in Samenleving en Politick. Tijdschrift voor een democratisch socialisme, which devoted its issue of March 1997 to a comparison between Belgium and the Netherlands.

(4) Too good to be true?, The Economist of 12 October 1996.

(5) OECD National Account Statistics, OECD (Paris), various years.

(6) Esping-Andersen, G., Welfare states without work: the impasse of labor shedding and famililism in continental European social policy, in Esping-Andersen, G. (ed.), Welfare States in Transition. National adaptations in global economies (London: Sage, 1996), 66–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(7) In its introduction of the ‘Economic Survey for the Netherlands 1984/1985’ (Paris, February 1985, p. 7), the OECD writes that ‘the deterioration in its growth and employment performance was indeed worse than that of other countries. Since the mid-1970s real GDP had grown at a rate below the OECD average and the unemployment rate has shot up to one of the highest in the OECD region’.

(8) This became later the best-known aspect of ‘the Dutch miracle’ and was first discovered by Jacques Delors who gave it a central place in his call to create a more ‘employment intensive’ growth pattern in Europe in the White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, and Employment (Brussels: European Commission, 1993).

(9) Exports of goods and services accounted for 51% of GDP in 1994, compared with 43% in 1970; the comparable figures for Germany are 23% (1970: 21%), for France, the UK, Sweden, the United States 11%, and Japan 9.5%.

(10) Hemerijck, A. G., Corporatist Immobility in the Netherlands, in Crouch, C., Traxler, C. F. (eds), Organized Industrial Relations: What Future? (Aldershot: Averbury, 1995), 183–226.Google Scholar

(11) Windmuller, J.P., Labor relations in the Netherlands (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

(12) Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR), Een werkend perspectief, Arbeidsparticipatie in de jaren ‘90 (The Hague: SDU, 1990)Google Scholar, reports to the government no. 38.

(13) Foundation of Labour, A New Course (The Hague, December 1993), p. 3.Google Scholar

(14) Therborn, G., Why Some People are More Unemployed than Others. The strange paradox of growth and unemployment (London, Verso, 1986).Google Scholar

(15) The Economist, 30 January 1982.