中国与欧洲就业刺激政策的比较.docxVIP

The Practice of Activation in China1. IntroductionIn the early 1990s, most western countries were plunged into recessions and experienced great changes in social structures, which brought the pressures to welfare states in Europe. The problems of high unemployment had been increasingly prominent and spreading throughout the Europe. Under new challenges, many governments realized that there was a need to act together at EU level and to find solutions through closer and longer cooperation. On the basis of the new provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty and launched at the Luxembourg Job Summit, the European Employment Strategy (EES) came out and developed successfully (Wikipedia). It was a significant shift from passive policies to active measures and contributed to solve problems concerning labour market in Europe. China, on the other side of the world, was also confronted with profound changes in social and economic systems in 1990s. During the course of transformation, the problems of unemployment emerged and then rapidly become unprecedented pressure to the society. As a consequence, the government attempted to adopt active ways to improve the labour-market policies. Although the great differences in politics, economics and cultures between China and EU, there were similarities shared by them in incentives of policy reforms that was to meet the need of changing internal and external environments. This paper will first discuss the background of the employment policy reform in China, and then use the framework of activation to reflect on the EES and further analyze the activation policies in China to see how the policies comfort to the activation. 1.1 Activation policies in EuropeEmployment is a fundamental source of empowerment and equality, and to prevent unemployment has always been a priority goal of the labour movement. Some people claimed that unemployment inevitably entails powerlessness, loss of autonomy and social marginalization, regardless of economic compensa