The paper shows that the growing employment gap between Europe and the USA over recent decades reflected the failure of services-employment rates in Europe to converge to American levels whilst European employment rates in goods production were falling rapidly towards those of the USA. The...

This paper summarizes household-expenditure patterns in the United States based on the 1980, 1990, and 1997 Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CEX). The CEX data used in the analysis have been organized to make them as comparable as possible to data extracted from corresponding expenditure surveys in...