Growth and Unemployment: A bibliometric analysis on mechanisms and methods

The relation between growth and unemployment is being studied throughout a diverse set of contributions over the last years. Taking into account the current economic situation, this topic is regaining attention amongst economists essentially due to the importance of this relationship as a way to overcome the high unemployment rate that has been characterizing the European labour market. In the first part of the paper we provide an analysis and a categorization of the most important contributions on the field until 2000s. In the second part we develop a bibliometric analysis in order to identify the evolution pattern of the main research lines, using a quantitative approach. Then, we provide an update of the literature by describing the new theoretical mechanisms and empirical evidence regarding the relationship between growth and unemployment. A substantial increase of new effects (reallocation effect, leapfrogging effect, disciplinary unemployment effect, minimum wage effect, updating technology effect, schooling and working effect and agglomeration economies effect) and a relative predominance of “formal” and “empirical” methodologies, with a very low weight of articles combining both methods are some of the main findings.