WORKING CONDITIONS AS KEY DRIVERS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR EUROPE

The paper focuses on designing a general framework of analysis for the working conditions in Europe, as main drivers of economic growth, with a decisive contribution to the increase in GDP per person employed. The economic literature attests a tight interdependence between job quality, mainly reflected through the working environment, work intensity, working program, skills, earnings or job difficulty and the labour productivity, job satisfaction, respectively performance and economic growth. Therefore, we have developed a complex cluster analysis based on the Ward method and Euclidian distance that allowed for a proper grouping of EU-28 countries according to the outcomes resulted on three job quality indices. Furthermore, we configured six macroeconometric models processed through the correlated panels corrected standard error method of estimation (PCSE) and OLS in order to assess the impact of various measures of the working conditions upon the GDP per person employed. The results of the cluster analysis point out that Central and Eastern European countries tend to have a less flexible working program but with more hours worked and increased job difficulty compared to the other Member States, while the estimation results for the job quality impact models upon GDP per person employed highlight important positive effects of all four job quality dimensions considered as explanatory variables (fixed program, tight deadlines, paid training, job prospects), reflected in terms of significant improvements in the level of GDP per person employed for the 28 panel considered economies.