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 stabilizes in the absence of any wage-price surprises. Conventional thinking...

The paper looks at the main challenges to raise potential growth in the EU. It examines recent progress made regarding the structural reform efforts in EU product, labor, and financial markets, and it attempts to assess their impact on overall macroeconomic performance in terms of output and...

Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

A variety of statistical methods and econometric techniques can be used attempting to disentangle the non-cyclical trend component of a time series and its purely cyclical part. This paper serves the purpose to demonstrate the potential contribution from the use of unobserved components...

The global downturn is now strongly affecting EU labour markets. In light of the downward revision to the growth projections and the uncertainty created by the financial meltdown, the outlook for employment has deteriorated considerably. This would also be consistent with the experience from...