NAIRU estimates in transitional economy with extremely high unemployment rate: the case of the Republic of Macedonia

The paper provides time-varying NAIRU estimates for Macedonian economy for the period 1998-2012, which were obtained using Ball and Mankiw (2002) approach and additionally supplemented with iterative procedure proposed by Ball (2009). The results revealed that the Macedonian NAIRU has the hump-shaped path: the estimated NAIRU is 23.5 percent in the second quarter of 1998, peaks at 28.3 percent in the last quarter of 2005 and falls to 23.6 percent in the last quarter of 2012. The estimation is based on the corrected LFS unemployment rate for the employment in the grey economy.