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...

By historical standards, the 1980's have been a time of high unemployment in West Germany. Not surprisingly, they have also been a boom period for theories about unemployment and policy proposals against it. This paper is an attempt in stocktaking: We shall try to sort out which of the most...

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...

In the post-war economic history of West Germany, there have been two periods of significant unemployment. If we take full employment to mean a jobless rate of less than 3 %, the two periods can be dated as 1948 to 1958 and 1975 to the present. While the latter period has naturally been subject...

In German post-war historiography, the 1960s are usually viewed as a time of political and economic transition. Politically, the period marks the watershed between the paternalistic conservatism of the Adenauer era and the full-scale social democracy of the early seventies, with the so-called...

Is the wage structure too rigid? Since the mid-1970s, this question has been one of the most persistent themes of the economic policy debate in West Germany. In recent months, the question is asked with a new sense of urgency: after the political and economic unification of the country in 1990,...

Economists like to justify public redistributive activity with standard externality arguments. While not denying the existence of a private charity market based on altruism, feelings of social responsibility, pure taste for giving or even -egoistic speculation on future rewards to charity, they...

Until recently the concept of tax expenditures has been exclusively analyzed along traditional Pigouvian lines. Broadly speaking, the introduction of tax/subsidy-schemes was considered to be justified whenever large number externalities prevent the market from working efficiently. This approach...