In the post-war economic history of West Germany, there have been two periods of significant unemployment. If we take full employment to mean a jobless rate of less than 3 %, the two periods can be dated as 1948 to 1958 and 1975 to the present. While the latter period has naturally been subject...

In recent years, there has been an intense debate among economists about the causes of unemployment in Europe. Broadly speaking, the views can be grouped into two familiar camps: those with a more (neo-)classical outlook - stressing the importance of factor price movements, institutional...

The main point of this paper will be that West German unemployment in the late 1980's has a curious double character: while its genesis is largely determined by the macroeconomic events of the last two decades - two stabilization crises and one wage revolution -, its current state reveals...

By historical standards, the 1980's have been a time of high unemployment in West Germany. Not surprisingly, they have also been a boom period for theories about unemployment and policy proposals against it. This paper is an attempt in stocktaking: We shall try to sort out which of the most...