Economic Crises, Policy Learning and Institutional Change: Unemployment Policy in Small European States, 1973-2012

The proposed paper aims to assess the factors which allow countries to learn from economic crises, and devise policy instruments to temper their impact on unemployment. To do so, the paper compares policy responses in the domain of unemployment protection in a number of small European countries (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden) across three economic crises: the oil shocks of the mid-1970s; the early 1990s; and the global economic crisis which started in 2008. The main argument of the paper is that the ability of countries to temper the impact of unemployment during a given economic crisis is strongly influenced by the responses it had produced to the previous crisis. However, rather than a path-dependent pattern, it is rather the opposite which can be observed: in order to limit the increase of unemployment during a given crisis, countries need to have faced high unemployment during the previous crisis.