The paper discusses the roles of stabilization policy and wage setting for macroeconomic stability in economies with centralized wage setting such as in the Nordic countries, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany. because of their economy-wide character labout market organizations in these countries are forced to consider the macroeconomic effects of and likely government responses to their behavior. The paper gives aan account of how the allocations of responsibilities for various macroeconomic goals between the government and labour market organizations have developed during the post-war period with the emphasis on the responses to the recent supply shocks.
The country experiences are used to draw conclusions on the advantages or disadvantages of various policy regimes and recent theoretical work on the behavior of trade unions is applied to explain the observed outcomes.