Social Partnership in Austria

The study uses international data about the grade of concentration of corporatism of employers and employees in their wage bargaining process, in order to analyse their influence on conflicts in the field of labour. It is explored whether a high degree of coordination of employees combined with a low one of employers leads to a low number of strike days. Though results show a high significance, they can only explain a small part of sample variance. This hints to the fact that other factors like country effects depicting legal regulations on workforce coordination and strikes might play an important role. The influence of wage bargaining coordination suggests a hypothetical volume of 1.9 strike days per year for 1,000 employees for Austria, which is close to the number observed in the past. Applying average and median grades of coordination of all observed countries (excluding Austria), this number increases to 8.2 or 7.0 days, respectively. Furthermore, the study tries to estimate the implied loss of total economy's value-added for Austria.