Academic Literature

France – Lessons on Youth Unemployment and Youth Employment Policy

The last crisis has merely amplified what is an increasingly problematic structural issue in France: Youth unemployment. In the last 30 years, the youth unemployment rate has never dropped below 15% and has regularly exceeded 20%. Yet, integrating young people into the labour market has been an ongoing public policy objective since the end of … Continue reading →

Listen to John Maynard Keynes’ voice on High Unemployment

When someone questions the effectiveness of Keynesian economics, the obvious reply is: Remember World War II? The British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that there is a role for government intervention when aggregate demand for goods and services drops, as it did during the Great Depression. Without increased public spending to make up for decreased … Continue reading →

Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”… Source: “Labor’s Paradise Lost” by Robert Skidelsky | Project Syndicate.

US – How far would you travel to find work?

Joe Mako has used Tableau to plot unemployment relative to the national average for every US state between 1976 and 2012. The aptly named horizon chart represents values using both colour and dimensions. In this case orange and red shading indicate an unemployment rate above the national average, while shades of blue show the inverse. … Continue reading →

Raising the minimum wage would be good for our economy

A higher minimum wage not only boosts workers’ incomes—something that is sorely needed to boost demand and get the economy going—but it also reduces turnover and shifts businesses toward a high-road, high-human-capital model. Still, some policymakers may be nervous about increasing the minimum wage while unemployment is so high. Yet, both the federal and states … Continue reading →

U.S. | Rising innequalities in the United States was a root cause of the financial crisis

As noted by The Economist, “[s]everal prominent economists now reckon that inequality was a root cause of the financial crisis.” Indeed, in recent years there has been a proliferation of analyses supporting this view writes Till van Treeck in Did inequality cause the U.S. financial crisis? published on boeckler.de. The explanation is straightforward: As the benefits of rising … Continue reading →

Shadow economies | A declining trend over time with and a spike staring in 2007

Shadow economies – sometimes called the black market or informal economy – exist in every country. But how big are they? This column presents some new approaches to estimating their size and uses them to compare shadow economies across rich and poor countries over the last 60 years write Ceyhun Elgin and Oguz Oztunali on Vox. … Continue reading →

Gender segregation in science career | Boys have more confidence in their science ability

NO matter how much money and thought the government puts into encouraging students at all educational levels to choose the hard subjects of science and mathematics, it will be tough to overcome the “girl nerd” factor reports The Australian  in  ‘Girl-nerd’ factor stops women taking ‘boy’ jobs. Joanna Sikora  and  Artur Pokropek explore gender segregation of adolescent science … Continue reading →

New definition of Unemployment Rate | Supernatural Rate = Actual Rate – Natural rate

The Natural Rate Hypothesis has been around us for … since Freidman presidential adress (1968?). Economists know that the definition lies on shaky grounds.

From factories to cubicles – 60 years of labor market changes in a chart

American Laid Off Workers | Three-in-Five Found New Jobs

“Fifty-nine percent of workers who were laid off from full-time jobs in the last year reported they found new positions, up from 55 percent last year.” according to CareerBuilder Survey. Majority of Workers Finding Jobs in New Fields 60 percent of workers in the 2011 survey took jobs in different fields vs 48 percent last … Continue reading →

U.S. | Shares of Low-wage and low-income workers have grown over the last three decades

Three decades of stagnating earnings for bottom deciles of male wage earners and 1990s anti-poverty policies promoting employment among poor single mothers suggest increases in the ranks of low-wage breadwinners living in low-income households. Low-wage workers often get few employer sponsored benefits, while antipoverty programs target poor non-earners; these factors suggest low-wage and low-income workers may be unprotected … Continue reading →

Scholl to work transition : lessons from around the world

In a well documented paper, David Raffe, from University of Edinburgh, tells us that : The processes and outcomes of education-work transitions vary across countries and these differences tend to persist over time Institutional differences which create different national ‘logics’ largely explain these differences System reactions to pressure and  theirs impacts vary. His General findings Where … Continue reading →

At The Root Of the Global Job Gap | Finance and economic growth delinked

The neglect of credit and debt in economic theory continues to produce muddled policy thinking. Take the tendency to protect banks lock, stock and barrel, at huge costs. The mantra is that if we let banks go bankrupt, that will ruin the economy. This is a nifty inversion of the truth: it is precisely the … Continue reading →

Unemployment in the U.S. | What Can Policy Do?

The U.S. labor market has been reeling since the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007. Public concern has largely focused on the unemployment rate, which rose to double digits and has stalled at more than 8 percent. This rate is unacceptably high, and macroeconomic policy efforts have been unsuccessful in bringing it down write Robert … Continue reading →