Understanding Unemployment in Developed Industrial Economies

Abstract

In the last decade, most industrial countries have operated at levels of unemployment which, in previous times, would have seemed inconceivable. Even in the United States, ‘normal’ rates of unemployment in the latter half of the 1970s have been almost twice those of the 1960s, and whereas we used to speak in the 1950s and 1960s as if the ‘full employment’ level of unemployment was in the range of 3.5 to 4 per cent of the labour force, that level is now almost universally taken to be around 6 per cent.