In a general equilibrium model of a small open economy with a nontraded goods sector involuntary low-skilled labour unemployment is introduced by an exogenously given wage rate, orientating ourselves by what has been called in the literature the 'European scenario'. By the concept of constrained...

The decline in unskilled workers’ real wagesduring the 1980s in the United States andthe increase in their unemployment inEurope (due to the comparative inflexibilityof European labor markets vis-à-vis those in the UnitedStates)1 have prompted a search for possible explanations.This search...

•The British economy has been performing well for the last decade, but there is an annual productivity gap of £30 billion between the English average and that of the industrial North (ONS, cited in Northern Way, 2007).•A recent government review has stated that the UK’s skills base...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness iscausally associated to a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using:(i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries.The time...