A toothless bite? The effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy as a governance tool

an article by Paul Copeland (University of London, UK) and Beryl ter Haar (Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies and The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 23 Number 1 (February 2013)

Abstract

This article concerns the effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy (EES) as a governance tool.

It analyses the policy measures of the Member States with regard to the commonly agreed guidelines and the country-specific recommendations of the Council. To analyse the policy measures the paper introduces a new quantitative method, which is applied to ten EU Member States during 2005–2009.

After presenting the results, the paper subsequently analyses the level of follow-up with regard to future intended reforms within the Member States and their level of responses to the country-specific recommendations.

Although it is difficult to attribute the reforms within the Member States to the EES, the analysis reveals that it is hard to get Member States to move beyond their national priorities, resulting in the EES being a weak governance tool.

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