In recent years, there has been an intense debate among economists about the causes of unemployment in Europe. Broadly speaking, the views can be grouped into two familiar camps: those with a more (neo-)classical outlook - stressing the importance of factor price movements, institutional...

This paper presents a synoptic interpretation of structural unemployment in Europe. The paper consists of three parts. Part 1 summarises some major stilysed facts of the record and the state of unemployment in Europe. In part 2, these facts are taken as the basis for a theoretical interpretation...

Since the mid-seventies, the general public of some European countries has been listening to a growing chorus of economists and politicians who lament the rising regional imbalances of unemployment. The chorus is especially large in Britain and West Germany where both an approximate north-south...

This paper is no more than a critical note on the mismatch philosophy. Its main point is that, under empirically acceptable assumptions, all measures developed so far - and probably all measures likely to emerge from refining the mismatch tools - are bound to seriously underestimate the extent...