Labor Market Reform Quotes

When nations are willing to undertake serious economic reform, we should help them to do it.

There is only one way to reduce unemployment in France: You have to explain to the French people that they have to work harder.

We are implementing an in-depth reform on labor market, not to reduce rights for workers but to provide more visibility and more efficiency to investors and employers because it's the key for job creation.

Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.

During my three years as chief economist of the World Bank, labor market issues were looked at through the lens of neoclassical economics. A standard message was to increase labor market flexibility. The not-so-subtle subtext was to lower wages and lay off unneeded workers.

The growth model China has relied on for the last 30 years - one predicated on low-cost exports to the rest of the world and investment in resource intensive heavy manufacturing - is unlikely to serve it well in the next 30 years.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

It [the government] has failed to make the proper adjustments so that the invention of NEW MACHINERY instead of throwing workers out of employment, will only shorten the hours of work for all labor.

My mission is to put France back on its feet. The priority is employment. Efforts have to be made, but those efforts must be made fairly.

Egypt's problem is that you've got an economy that works for about 40 million people, only you have 90 million people. The answer to the Egyptian problem is not guns, but jobs. We've got to find a private-sector, nongovernmental, aggressive way of creating jobs. That's not America's role totally.

Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking.

Indebted countries can only grow out of their debt troubles through strong economic growth; austerity measures alone cannot work. It is imperative to engage in deep structural reform to spur growth.

It is a fact that, if I single out Germany, our rate of growth is too low and we have very high unemployment.

France has to accelerate in terms of reform.

We have to build further on the collaboration with business and labor to restore confidence and prevent an investment downgrade.

History is replete with examples of moments in time when we talk about deficit reduction and try to advance on it around the world, that is, where it leads to job losses, not job creation.

Reforming the way the state works with businesses and providing incentives for employers will help preserve and create new jobs in Massachusetts.

I do think there are ways to increase wages significantly, even in a global era. But you have to take voters and consumers with you on this journey - and that involves a tremendous, and long-term, public education campaign.

When we were actually in the Keating reform era, the Business Council was of no help.