Catching up and unemployment in the EU

Europe’s catching up of the US in per capita income levels has, with some exceptions, come to a halt and turned into a decline during the 1980s and 1990s with a simultaneous secular worsening in the EU unemployment situation. The aim of the paper is to present a systematic description of the role of unemployment in the convergence process, which is an issue ignored in the growth literature. In this effort a simple disaggregation is utilised, which decomposes the disparity in the level of income per capita, or its change over time, into four components: productivity, unemployment, participation rate and age structure. The EU countries show marked internal differences with respect to these factors. Secondly, we assess the role of unemployment in the convergence process by estimating the importance of the effect of the initial unemployment and the change in unemployment with respect to convergence of the EU to the US. We find that the former effect is not significant while over time there is a crowding in type of phenomenon, where a reduction in unemployment accelerates convergence more than with its direct impact. – Convergence ; unemployment ; EU