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The Social Costs of Unemployment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Alan Morris*
Affiliation:
School of Social Science and Policy, University of New South Wales
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The last two decades have witnessed the unraveling of the Keynesian consensus and full employment that characterized the quarter century after World War II. Inequality and poverty have deepened and hundreds of thousands of Australians no longer have job security and are being intermittently or permanently shut out of the formal economy. This review article examines the social costs of unemployment focusing on The Price of Prosperity: The Economic and Social Costs of Unemployment (TPOP) edited by Peter Saunders and Richard Taylor.

The TPOP is an ambitious endeavour to quantify the costs of employment in a number of areas. Thus there are chapters on the impact of unemployment on health, poverty, inequality, indigenous Australians, youth, the family, crime and urban neighbourhoods. The chapters are consummate reviews of major Australian and international studies on the impact of unemployment, making the book a key text.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2002

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