The Competitiveness of the Nordic Countries – from flexicurity to mobication

The report argues that high labour mobility and a flexible education system directly

supported by government policies may be crucial for the competitiveness and future

prosperity of the Nordic countries. In recent years, flexicurity has emerged as a central

concept in the debate on how regulation of work and welfare could ensure consistency

between supply and demand of labour.

However, the current crisis has shown that the positive effects of the so-called

Danish flexicurity model can be questioned. Furthermore, other dynamics ensuring high

levels of employment seem to be present. For instance the development in policy formulation

- especially at the European level - suggests that tomorrow's competitive advantage depends

on the ability to ensure a high labour mobility through comprehensive and flexible

educational systems. It is this relationship between mobility and education that we

term mobication. The term implies that skills are systematically used to promote mobility

within and between labour markets. Mobication assume that tomorrow's job openings will be

even more changeable and unpredictable than today. This emphasises the challenge of

combining a flexible labour market with a high level of security for employees. Flexibility

must ensure that employees are moving to where the job openings are. In the flexicurity

debate the security aspect has been focused on the possibility to obtain various forms of

benefits if one is made redundant. Mobication suggests that security primarily comes from

continuous education and training, meaning that the individual employee will have access to

further training and/or re-skilling in all stages of working life. The overall aim is to obtain

fewer and shorter periods of unemployment for each employee, in spite of restructuring,

introduction of new technologies, plant closures, etc. In this sense mobication is an attempt to

further develop the Danish flexicurity model.