The institutional political economy of social pacts: A critical appraisal

Since the early 1980s, governments in almost all Western European countries have sought to boost national economic competitiveness by regulating wages, deregulating labor markets, and reforming welfare systems. In some countries these policies have been pursued through national-level bipartite agreements with unions or tripartite agreements with unions and employers. Commonly referred to as social pacts, these agreements emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in a range of countries with very different welfare regimes, industrial relations systems, and corporatist structures, such as Finland, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands (Fajertag and Pochet 2000 ).