Georg Fischer Author & Editor

Georg Fischer is a senior research associate at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies and an associate at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), focusing on employment and social trends in Europe and on social convergence. He retired from the European Commission as Director of Social Affairs in 2017, and he previously worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on labour markets in transition economies and served in the cabinet of the Minister of Finance and in the Ministry of Labour in Austria. He was a research fellow at the Social Science Center Berlin, the Economic Cooperation Foundation in Tel Aviv, the Yale University Macmillan Center, and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan. Robert Strauss retired from the European Commission in early 2020 after working there for 35 years. During this period, he worked in industrial and internal market policy, and social affairs with a particular focus on employment issues. Among the policy challenges he worked on were the single market for services, flexicurity, skills and employment, EU unemployment insurance, a European minimum wage, and the macro-economic effects of inequality.