ABSTRACT
There are two primary reasons for the increased interest in labor market flexibility since the early 1970s: first, the interest in production flexibility, often associated with the just-in-time production techniques used by larger Japanese manufacturers; and, second, the worsening as well as diverging unemployment patterns in the advanced capitalist countries after the early 1970s. While unemployment increased in Japan and Europe as well as the United States after the early 1970s, the increase was considerably greater in Europe, for which the experience of the former West Germany was typical. (All data in this study refer to the former West Germany or, in most recent years, to the regions of the former West Germany.) Even though the rate of unemployment in 1990 was lower in West Germany than in the United States, it was the manifold increase in unemployment in the former that drew particular attention (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1994).
