Resume SALAIRES MINIMUM ET SOUPLESSE

This article reviews the national minimum wage legislation that exists in the E U and asks what contribution a Union wide minimum wage policy might make to overcoming the threat of ’social dumping ’ in the single market. The available empirical evidence suggests that the adoption of such a policy is likely to have only a limited adverse impact upon employ-ment, confined principally to the young. Nonetheless, to place this debate in the broader context of the performance of the Eur-opean labour market, the rest of the article attempts to estimate recent trends in the real wage flexibility of eight member states. Esti-mating a Wage Rigidity Index for the years 1961-91, derived from fitting augmented Phil-lips curves for the whole period and from plot-ting year-on-year trends, this study detects a general deterioration in real wage flexibility m the 1980s. While the Netherlands has shown the greatest wage flexibility, the UK, despite a government committed to labour market flexi-bility, has the worst performance. No Euro-pean country is able to match the performance of Japan. Poor wage flexibility suggests that the inflationary consequences of introducing minimum wage legislation may be more serious than anticipated