Malinvaud’s and Keynes’s unemployment typologies: do they coincide?

Abstract

Malinvaud’s reconsideration of the theory of unemployment emphasises the distinction between classical and Keynesian unemployment equilibria, associating the former with excessive real wages and the latter with deficient effective demand. This distinction suggests a close proximity with the one established by Keynes between voluntary and involuntary unemployment. However, Malinvaud’s typology concerns two mutually exclusive regimes, whereas Keynes’s typology concerns two coexisting unemployment categories. Besides, the former rests on the implicit view of price rigidity as the troublemaker and of price flexibility as the ultimate policy target, whereas the latter follows from the opposition between refusal to cooperate and inability to coordinate, and points to different policy strategies.