The persistently high rate of unemployment has probably been Western Europe's most important economic problem of the 1970s and 1980s. Average unemployment rose relentlessly between the early seventies and the mid-eighties, in contrast to the United States, where unemployment has displayed a...

This paper investigates whether the structure of product markets in the industrial economies conforms to the assumptions of the two main benchmark models of international macroeconomics, namely the one-sector imperfect-substitutes model, and the two-sector model with non-traded goods. Our...