Purpose of the volume

Large-scale unemployment has become the prime social, economic and political issue in Europe and a number of other OECD regions. It is a colossal waste of human potential and national product; it is responsible for poverty and inequality; it erodes human capital; it creates social and political tensions wherever it strikes. In the last few years a large number of books, reports and papers has been published, most of them attempting to analyse the ascent of European unemployment, but very few have focused on the policies necessary to reduce it. This volume is an attempt to fill this gap.

In most countries where unemployment is a major problem, it is product of several simultaneous causes, each of which interact with the rest: small wonder that unemployment policies are difficult to design. Moreover, many policies that could improve economic efficiency are not politically implementable. The political realities dictate that it is not enough to find policies that give more jobs for those currently unemployed than they take away from those currently employed; it is vital that those who stand to gain are in the political majority.

This volume attempts to deal with these problems head-on, and this requires a break with a hoary academic tradition. The tradition is to write papers that develop detailed theoretical and empirical models of unemployment and to include a short section at the end about vague ‘policy implications’.