Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

Policy transfer would presumably receive short shrift by proponents of the
VoC approach. Under different sets of institutional complementarities,
economic reform must be “incentive compatible” in the sense of being
consistent with the functioning of the underlying economy. However, as it
happens, wholesale attempts at policy transfer under the Lisbon Strategy
have been a relatively rare occurrence. Although EU policymakers may
have stepped up their monitoring of member states’ reform efforts in
recent years, they have grown more reluctant and less prescriptive in
their approach to this task. This tendency is reflected in the increasingly
neutral language employed in the conclusions to the annual Spring
European Council and in the European Commission’s aversion to naming,
shaming and blaming member states that fail to deliver on their reform
commitments.
Perhaps the most ambitious attempt at policy transfer concerns the EU’s
efforts to promote collective learning from the Scandinavian experience
of labour-market reform. 20 The Spring European Council in Brussels
in March 2006 explicitly called on member states to outline “under an
integrated flexicurity approach” and, to this end, invited the Commission
to work with member states and the social partners to draw up common
principles. 21 On the basis of this mandate, the European Commission held
a stakeholders meeting in April 2007, which was attended by over 400
representatives of the social partners, NGOs and member states. The results
of this meeting served as an input into the June 2007 Communication
setting out common non-binding principles on flexicurity. The Spring
European Council in March 2008 adopted these principles and asked
member states to implement them in their National Reform Programmes
for Growth and Jobs.
The impact of the flexicurity debate on the reform process has been
far from trivial. According to the Commission’s Annual Progress on
Growth and Jobs, around half of the EU’s 27 member states “have now
developed or are developing comprehensive flexicurity approaches, and
combining efforts on contractual arrangements, lifelong learning, active
labour market policies and social security systems” compared with only a
“handful of member states in 2007”. 22
From a VoC perspective, attempts to transfer the Danish flexicurity
model to other EU member states could have disastrous consequences.
The “original” Danish strain of flexicurity combined a very high degree
of flexibility in hiring and firing (in a country that has one of the shortest
Chapter 8 – Dermot Hodson and Marco Simoni 121