Is Portugal Really so Arteriosclerotic? Results from a Cross-Country Analysis of Labour Adjustment

Abstract

Summary measures of the overall strictness of a country’s employment protection laws have proven popular constructs in cross-country studies of the covariation of labour market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable position in the international rankings. We critique this reputation in two ways: first, by offering a modicum of corrective institutional detail; and, second, via a detailed analysis of the process of labour adjustment in Portugal, benchmarked to the experience of Germany, Spain, and the U.K. Our error-correction model indicates that Portugal has a very high speed of adjustment to deviations from the long-run employment output equilibrium. More in accord with received wisdom is the very smooth adjustment mechanism of the U.K.