Servizi per l'impiego e politiche dell'occupazione in Europa : idee e modelli per l'Italia

The book deals with labour market policies in three European countries, with well developed and consolidated experiences in this field: United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden. Each country is analysed in a separate section of the volume, according to the same scheme: public employment services, benefits aimed at supporting unemployed people, active labour market policies are investigated in their historical evolution and in the present situation. The method adopted is the juridical-comparative one, though open to the contributions of other social sciences, such as political science, sociology and economics. The last section of the book is divided into two chapters: the first one summarizes the results of the comparative investigation, which reveals the emergence of a “welfare to work model”, characterised by individual provision of employment services and growing activation. However, the domains of unemployment benefits regulation and active labour market policies still remain sensibly different, because of historical and social traditions strongly embedded in the juridical and institutional context. The second chapter of the last section describes the Italian experience in these fields, showing, in comparison with the country analysed, rooted and persistent weaknesses in many respects. The author makes some suggestions in order to improve the functioning of institutions operating in the labour market.