It's not a perfect system, but it works reasonably well, even if it does somewhat disadvantage people with lower wages.
Yes, but the US also measures unemployment differently. People are culled from those statistics much faster in the US than in Belgium.
> lower per capita income
True, but that's not caused by indexation of wages (COLA) alone - I'm not even sure it's a statistically that significant. It's down to a combination of factors, such as market size, startup culture, taxation, social welfare...
> These across-the-board mandated policies do impose a cost, they make the economy as a whole less flexible and decrease employment, at the margin.
The Belgian economy is less flexible by default, because it's constrained by three languages, seven governments, a total area slightly larger than Maryland and a population roughly equal to Ohio's.
Whether it's a cost is debatable, if Belgians on average live almost three years longer, on average have cheaper and better education, etc. If you compare the quality of life [0], Belgium is ahead of the US in many metrics except precisely cost of living,, housing size and wage. All I'm saying is: economical statistics don't paint the whole picture.