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...

Greater labour market flexibility is often advocated as the solution to joblessness. Calls to weaken minimum wage provisions, to make out-of-work benefits less generous and to reduce legislative or bargained restrictions on hiring and firing have the common objective of encouraging those without...

The paper examines specific features of structural change in the UK since 1997, contrasting the decline in industrial jobs with the rise in a variety of service jobs. It examines the proximate causes of structural change, in particular whether the chronically slow growth of manufacturing output...

Full employment was the centrepiece of the economic policy of social democracy in the post-war period. Whilst the role of Keynesianism in policy making may be exaggerated, it offered the prospect of maintaining full employment without any section of society having to pay. Problems with the...

Analysis of contemporary unemployment has increasingly focussed on the position of the least skilled. The deterioration in their labour market position is first situated in the context of structural trends in the labour market. The development of labour market inequality in the 1980s is...

This paper investigates the relationship between export market shares and relative unit labour costs using a long panel of twelve manufacturing industries across fourteen OECD countries. We ask two questions: (a) how sensitive are export market shares to changes in relative costs and (b) what...

This paper documents the employment disadvantage faced by the less qualified part of the labor force and examines the factors that influence the differing extent of this disadvantage across OECD countries. We argue that employment rates for quartiles of the population ranked by educational...

First paragraph: Since 1990 the UK economy has grown at 2.4 percent per year, compared to 1.7 percent in the Eurozone. The growth differential in favour of the British economy, previously regarded as the »sick man of Europe«, has even been increasing. Since 2000 the UK has grown twice as fast...