The Incidence of Long-Term Unemployment in Australia 1978-2003

This paper explores the following question - Has there been any long-run increase (or decrease) in the ‘incidence’ of long-term unemployment once we have corrected for cyclical factors? Our research leads us to conclude: (i) that the incidence of male long-term unemployment has been neither rising nor falling, once we allow for ‘cyclical factors’ and, (ii) that the incidence of female long-term unemployment has been rising, once we allow for ‘cyclical factors’. We conjecture that there is a link between increasing female participation (which we take to be a proxy for ‘attachment to the labour market’ – and thus attachment to unemployment as well as employment) and an increasing incidence of long-term unemployment. Experimenting with policy dummies, we find no evidence of policy effects on the incidence of long-term unemployment in the case of males and females but there is some evidence that policy had temporary effects on females.