Lack of public funding and environmental deterioration are promoting the search for innovative mechanisms enabling to boost farmers’ provision of agri-environmental climate public goods. This work ...aims to contribute to the current debate by highlighting the role of innovative contractual solutions through a systematic review of more than 60 articles. The review analyses the potential of result-based and collective contracts as innovative solutions compared to action-based instruments, which are those currently most used. The design of innovative contracts and other mechanisms, e.g., auction and screening contracts, can reduce the policy failures due to asymmetric information. The paper emphasises the trade-off between an accurate design of agri-environmental schemes and the related administrative burden, highlighting the need for a better understanding of the role of mechanisms design into the policy cycle. Some new instruments were not analysed in the review, due to the scarcity of literature, and there is the need of more case studies providing information on the effectiveness of instruments when implemented in different contexts. We fill the gap in empirical evidence through a SWOT analysis that evaluates the effectiveness and acceptability of innovative instruments for policy purposes.
This study re-examines the Frames of Reference (FoR) concept in Employment Relations/Industrial Relations (EIR) studies, challenging its efficacy in the face of shifting world of work and advancing ...its development by leveraging historical accounts. Utilizing the case of collective contracting in China (1949-1956), we scrutinise its embedded values and approaches via Bray, Budd and Macneil's Frames of Reference on Co-operation. Our findings suggest that these FoRs offer a more potent analytical lens compared to Fox's trichotomous frames, underscoring the resonance of consultative unitarism and collaborative pluralism in state-owned and private sectors, respectively. While emphasising the importance of innovative constructs and terminology in contemporary EIR discourse, we advocate for greater attention to power dynamics within future FoR frameworks. Furthermore, this research affirms the vital role of historical insights in developing and refining FoR constructs. We encourage future research to integrate historical accounts further, promoting both horizontal and longitudinal comparisons, and enhancing theory generation in EIR. This study thus contributes to FoR literature by elucidating potential dimensions for future development and underscoring the enduring relevance of historical insights.
Innovative agri-environmental contracts are increasingly studied in the literature, but their adoption has been relatively slow and geographically scattered. Action-based agri-environmental measures ...remain the predominant policy mechanism across Europe. A three-round Policy Delphi study was conducted with policy makers, scientific experts, farmers’ representatives, and NGOs from across 15 different European countries, to investigate how and under which circumstances novel contractual solutions could be implemented more widely. The expert panel perceived result-based and collective contractual elements as the most promising. Although considered beneficial from several aspects, value chain contracts were perceived less relevant to the policy environment. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Pillar 2 measures were highlighted by the experts as the key policy area to implement novel contracts by national or regional authorities, but Pillar 1 eco-schemes, being launched in the CAP 2023–2027, were also considered as a potentially suitable framework for testing and implementation. The Delphi panel envisaged innovative contracts should be adopted by governments in iterative steps and not as a complete substitute for current payment schemes, but rather as an additional incentive to them. Such an incremental approach allows contractual innovations to capitalise on existing best practices. But it also implies the risk that innovative contracts could remain marginal and fail to substantially change farmers’ behaviour, resulting in a failure to improve environmental conditions.
•A policy Delphi survey investigated options for novel agri-environmental contracts.•Result-based and collective contracts are perceived as promising innovations.•Value-chain (certification, labelling) contracts are perceived less policy-relevant.•The ideal contract mixes action- and result-based elements.•Implementation of novel contracts should be gradual and adapted to local contexts.
•We assess preferences for a PES contract in a rural community in Mexico.•Respondents prefer rewards in cash rather than social or productive investments.•Help provided by external consultants is a ...satisfactory programme characteristic.•Community leaders have enhanced the participation of their peers.
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have been promoted worldwide as a means to incentivise biodiversity, forest conservation and sustainable forest management. Mexico has been at the forefront of PES implementation since 2003, and the country has now more than 2.6 million hectares under a variety of PES contracts. In this article, we perform a choice experiment with a group of 82 community forest owners who are receiving a payment for providing biodiversity-related ecosystem services in the state of Chiapas. Considering possible future evolutions in contract design, we explore individuals preferences over contract characteristics including who is involved in deciding the parcels to be included in the contract, the type of technical intermediary, the level of payment and the type of incentive (either in individual cash payments or in collective investments). Our results show a reluctance to decide collectively on issues related to forest conservation, as well as on dedicating a share of payments to collective projects. We find strong individual preferences for payments in cash, even when the amount of monetary compensation is lower than in the existing PES contract, and we show that most participants value positively the help received by external service providers in PES implementation. An analysis of preference heterogeneity suggests that community leaders play a key role in moderating individual preferences and enhancing participation structured around working groups. We thus argue that the willingness to accept a PES program is greatly dependent on local governance factors. As such, exploring ways for PES contractual options to match the diversity of local conditions and individual preferences – allowing a modular allocation of PES into cash or investment on an individual or collective basis- could further stimulate participation in Mexico’s PES programme.
•Novel dataset with signature dates, wage floors, and Social Security records in Italy and Spain.•Wage structure is not found to reflect labor market conditions back at the time of bargaining.•The ...results support the hypothesis that (most) wages respond to local current unemployment.
In several OECD countries employer federations and unions fix skill-specific wage floors for all workers in an industry. One view of those “explicit” contracts argues that the prevailing wage structure reflects the labor market conditions back at the time when those contracts were bargained, with little space for renegotiation. An alternative view stresses that only workers close to the minima are affected by wage floors and that the wage structure reacts to current labor market conditions. We disentangle between those hypotheses by testing whether wages react more to local contemporaneous unemployment or unemployment at the time of contract renewal in Italy and Spain. The results suggest that most wages in the metalworking industry adjusted to the cycle between 2005 and 2013, and that rigidity generated by lack of renegotiation is confined to wages close to the floors (about 12-15% of the total).
In recent years, Germany has experienced an increasing impact of craft unions that negotiate high wage increases for the occupations they represent. This article analyses under which conditions ...workers perceive such over-proportional wage increases for occupational groups represented by craft unions as (rather) fair. We use a vignette approach, asking respondents for their fairness perceptions of several hypothetical scenarios. The results show that perceptions depend on the burdens of the occupational group, the size of the wage increase, information policies and potential consequences for other groups. These findings are in line with social and organizational justice theories about equity and informational justice.
This paper reports on the employment effects of pacts for employment and competitiveness (PEC) concluded at company level and characterized by concessions from both bargaining partners. In these ...works, councils agree to company-specific deviations from an industry-level contract such as reduced wages or prolonged working time, in exchange for employment guarantees or investment programmes to mitigate a possible decline of employment or to improve the company's competitiveness. Since the number of empirical studies on the employment effects of PECs is very small and no investigation addressing the global economic crisis has been conducted until now, we base our analysis on the IAB Establishment Panel Survey of 2006-2009 and adopt conditional difference estimators to assess the role of PECs within the global crisis. In our analysis, we find evidence suggesting that the adoption of PECs is connected with a decreased negative employment effect within the crisis given an establishment is affected by the crisis.
The response of human capital accumulation to changes in the anticipated returns to schooling determines the type of skills supplied to the labor market, the productivity of future cohorts, and the ...evolution of inequality. Unlike the USA, the UK or Germany, Spain has experienced between 1995 and 2008 a drop in the returns to medium and tertiary education and, with a lag, a drop in schooling attainment of recent cohorts, providing the setup to estimate the response of different forms of human capital acquisition to relative increases in low-skill wages. We measure the expected returns to schooling using skill-specific wages bargained in collective agreements at the province-industry level. We argue that those wages are easily observable by youths and relatively insensitive to shifts in the supply of workers. Our preferred estimates suggest that a 10% increase in the ratio of wages of unskilled workers to the wages of mid-skill workers increases the fraction of males completing at most compulsory schooling by between 2 and 6.5 percentage points. The response is driven by males from less educated parents and comes at the expense of students from the academic high school track-rather than the vocational training track.
Abstract In January 2013, within the framework of a National Inter-professional Agreement (NIA), the French government required all employers (irrespective of the size of their business) to offer ...private complementary health insurance to their employees from January 2016. The generalization of group complementary health insurance to all employees will directly affect insurers, employers and employees, as well as individuals not directly concerned (students, retirees, unemployed and civil servants). In this paper, we present the issues raised by this regulation, the expected consequences and the current debate around this reform. In particular, we argue that this reform may have adverse effects on equity of access to complementary health insurance in France, since the risk structure of the market for individual health insurance will change, potentially increasing inequalities between wage-earners and others. Moreover, tax exemptions given to group contracts are problematic because public funds used to support these contracts can be higher at individual level for high-salary individuals than those allocated to improve access for the poorest. In response to the criticism and with the aim of ensuring equity in the system, the government decided to reconsider some of the fiscal advantages given to group contracts, to enhance programs and aids dedicated to the poorest and to redefine an overall context of incentives.
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