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ABSTRACT:The aim of this article is to analyse the concept of governability of collective bargaining proposed by Traxler, Blaschke and Kittel (2001) and to demonstrate its explanatory capacity and limitations in the Spanish case. Governability is today an important subject that should be taken into account in the reform of industrial relations systems and in the debate between centralisation and decentralisation of collective bargaining in Europe. Our main hypothesis is drawn up in line with the institutionalist approach. We will argue and document with the results of collective bargaining, that the Spanish system of collective bargaining, in spite of the organizational weakness of the unions and of the employers associations, is governable thanks to the role of the state, the institutions, the legal ordering, as well as the tradition and the custom.

Este artículo estudia la evolución del asociacionismo empresarial en España. Empleamos el enfoque desarrollado por Franz Traxler para considerar que el mapa de asociaciones empresariales es el resultado de un acomodo gradual de ciertos mecanismos de compensación para superar tensiones organizativas y retos de representación. Se discuten una serie de indicadores con los que analizar el carácter adaptativo del asociacionismo empresarial. A modo de conclusión, el análisis indica que los cambios internos de la CEOE son el resultado de una prolongada erosión de un modelo asociativo estructurado jerárquicamente en torno a una confederación corporatista y monopolística, que la impulsan a ser más transparente

The authors' principal purpose is to study why the government in Spain has maintained price regulations on medicines during the last thirty-five years. The hypothesis is that price regulations were related to the regulatory style of the Spanish government in the 1960s and, since the last 1970s, have become a key instrument for preventing the pharmaceutical costs of the National Health System from rising. In order to test this hypothesis, two questions are considered. The first relates to how business interests and their main representative bodies have managed to influence the implementation of price regulations during the last thirty-five years. The second question concerns the extent to which changes in the prices of medicines have been effective in preventing increased costs of the Spanish National Health System drug bill between 1964 ad 1994. After analyzing the political economy of the price regulation of medicines and pharmaceutical cost-limiting policies during the last thirty-five years in Spain, and after estimating a function of the public demand for medicines between 1964 and 1994 in Spain, the authors extract the following two conclusions. First, price regulation has become a very useful instrument for preventing public pharmaceutical costs from rising since the late 1970s in Spain. Second, business interests have found it increasingly useful over the last thirty-five years to establish a stable framework in the market for medicines based on price regulation and the public provision of medicines.