But the work-rule rigidities of industrywide unions have doomed many an American job, notably in steel and autos.
Among the main culprits are vested interests, market structure and rigidities in bank ownership.
But even if labour market rigidities keep unemployment high, France will never have a Thatcherite revolution.
The European Central Bank likes to blame all of Germany's economic woes on its structural rigidities.
In Sweden active labour-market policies became an excuse for not dismantling other rigidities in the labour market.
The blame for the euro area's feeble growth rate lies mainly with an over-tight fiscal policy and structural rigidities.
So far, unlike Fiat, it has not been held back by such rigidities.
He could try to tackle some of the infamous rigidities in Germany's labour market but not with a general election looming.
One answer is the way in which German firms have learnt to deal with their country's rigidities: by shifting operations abroad.
Considerable rigidities would be injected into the flexible Internet system thus making innovation much harder both now and over the long term.
In India, old caste rigidities are being broken down (see article).
Stoiber has voiced anti-immigration views - but some observers doubt his willingness radically to reform Germany's protective labour laws and other economic rigidities.
It is popular to blame Europe's sluggish growth on structural rigidities.
Such rigidities may require monetary policy to play a bigger role.
This has created an irony: corporate Germany has gone from strength to strength even as the economy, beleaguered by high costs and rigidities, has faltered.
This suggests that concerns about nominal wage rigidities can be overdone.
ECONOMIST: Central banks disagree on the rate of inflation to aim for
Europe's high structural unemployment cannot be blamed on labour-market rigidities alone.
They include rigidities in product and labour markets and insufficient competition.
The real culprit is excessive rigidities in labour and product markets.
They find that a country with an average level of all eight labour-market rigidities would have seen a rise in unemployment of 7.2 percentage points since 1960.
Many studies have sought to explain Europe's high unemployment, but theirs is the first to quantify the impact of the interaction of economic shocks with labour-market rigidities over time.
The deteriorating state of public debt as off-budget spending swelled combined with institutional weaknesses and the rigidities imposed by the pegging of the peso to the US dollar, it found.
In America, where the social safety net was flimsier, there were far fewer regulatory rigidities and people were more willing to move, so workers responded more flexibly to structural shifts.
As a result of such rigidities, Japan's labor productivity lags behind the OECD average and has been variously measured at between 60% to 70% of the U.S. level, though Japanese work longer hours.
In essence, the pros acknowledge the rigidities in European labour markets, the differences in economic cycles and so forth, but believe that the creation of a single currency will cause these costs to diminish.
The power of trade unions has been reduced, national pay bargaining and other labour-market rigidities scrapped, and cuts in tax rates and stricter rules for claiming unemployment benefits have improved the incentive to work.
Clustering around Hollywood allows each of these small units to benefit as if it had the scale of an old movie studio, but without the rigidities of the studios' wage hierarchy and unionised labour.
Admittedly, cyclical increases in unemployment may become permanent if labour-market rigidities, such as strict hiring-and-firing laws, make it hard for the jobless to find work even when the economy recovers, a condition known as hysteresis.
"These include the rigidities in labour and services markets, and low levels of innovation, which continue to drive France's gradual but sustained loss of competitiveness and the gradual erosion of its export-oriented industrial base, " Moody's said.
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