Programme for research and actions on the development of the labour market : analysis of the dynamics of the job creation process in the United States and an evaluation of medium and long term prospects; Volume I: The role of demographic factors in U.S. job creation : performance since 1970

The United States has adjusted to the post 1973 era of structural economic change with far greater employment growth than any comparable European nation, several of which actually lost jobs. For this reason, policymakers in Europe are looking to the U.S. experience for signals on how they might intervene to improve their own employment situation. Policy prescriptions range from exclusive attention to rigidities affecting the supply of labor to policies to remedy the problem through conventional macroeconomic policies. In this paper, we examine the U.S. job creation experience from 1970-1984 in the hope of illuminating at least some of the policy prescriptions that do and do not appear to explain the U.S.'s relative good fortune over this period. Volume I reviews comparative data on the U.S. and European experience and attempts to develop measures of relative performance that get beyond the usual comparisons of absolute job growth. Sectoral changes in the composition of employment growth are also covered, as is the puzzle of "jobless growth" in Europe.