Knowing that their wages will be imposed on non-members through statutory extension, unions are less likely to moderate their claims and employers are more likely to agree to them. The experience with the Jobs Strategy shed relatively little light on the effect of changing such arrangements, since in most countries such institutional arrangements change little over time. The labour market outcomes of countries that had already weakened or abandoned such procedures before the Jobs Strategy, such as New Zealand and Australia, were positive, however, and the concern with legal extensions was retained in the revised Jobs Strategy. Some though not all empirical studies have found that high labour taxes are associated with higher unemployment rates (Belot and Van Ours, 2004; Nickell, 1997), and Elmeskov et al. (