The behaviour of unemployment in the UK is of particular interest in the light of the far reaching programme of reforms introduced since 1980. The paper first outlines the main theoretical ideas behind the concept of equilibrium unemployment, drawing a distinction between the factors which may...

This note gives a brief survey of main theoretical and empirical issues with respect to the NAIRU concept. According to modern labour market literature NAIRU is defined as the rate of unemployment at which inflation stabilises in the absence of any wage-price surprises. Conventional thinking...

This submission provides a brief factual survey of statutory minimum wage systems in OECD countries (Section B) as well as a summary of recommendations concerning minimum wages which have been presented in the OECD Jobs Study and recent OECD Economic Surveys (Section C). This is followed by a...

The use of the NAIRU-concept is not very widespread in Belgium. This may be partly due to an observed unemployment rate that is probably significantly higher than the NAIRU for most of the past two decades. Government policy to halve the administrative notion of unemployment by the beginning of...

For a long time European Economic and Monetary Union was mainly considered an internal European issue and external consequences were largely ignored. In contrast to most previous analyses, this paper looks at a number of international implications of monetary union. It is argued that several...

The paper gives a broad discussion of structural unemployment seen from a Danish perspective. In the Danish Ministry of Finance the level of structural unemployment is estimated using two indicators - NAIRU and ITRU. The two indicators basically reflect variations in unemployment and inflation...

The NAIRU is estimated by using the Japanese data. There are three major findings. The NAIRU has been increasing modestly since 1970. Unlike the standard specification adopted in many OECD countries it can be estimated more precisely when the unemployment rate with a several-quarter lead is...

This paper lays out a simple open economy macromodel based on the recent literature on imperfect competition and equilibrium unemployment. It is shown that the NAIRU is not a clearcut concept in the open economy framework. Furthermore, it is argued that the self-correcting mechanisms in the...