The Unemployment Crisis

This fully revised and up-dated abridgement of the well-established 1991 book, Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market is now an entirely accessible textbook on unemployment. It offers a wide-ranging international analysis of labor market institutions, recent unemployment experience, and governmental policies. The authors question the inevitability of present levels of unemployment in the Western world, and the view that there exists a trade-off between price stability and unemployment levels. This volume presents a lucid and comprehensive explanation of the reasons for unemployment, the existence of an average level, and the reasons why unemployment levels often fluctuate. The authors have created a general framework for their analysis that fully integrates macroeconomic theory with a detailed look at the microeconomic workings of the labor market. They effectively incorporate the latest theoretical research on topics such as insider-outsider theories and hysteresis in labor markets, and reveal the role of factors such as union bargaining, efficiency wages, and labor practices to combat unemployment. Students will find this book essential because of its comprehensive coverage of unemployment in the international arena and its clear exposition.