Missing Links in the Unemployment Relationship

Unemployment has been somewhat neglected within the world of economics in recent years. This is primarily because the subject has become less of an issue for many countries. However, even within the European Union, several regions still suffer from worrying levels of people out of work. Europe has experienced significant fluctuations in unemployment levels since the Second World War, and there have been many attempts at analysing the problem and confronting the related issues.

PHILIP ARESTIS is University Director of Research, Cambridge Centre for Economics and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, UK. He is also Adjunct Professor of Economics, University of Utah, US; Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, New York, US; Visiting Professor, University of Leeds, UK; and Visiting Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. He was a member of the Economics and Econometrics RAE panel in 1996 and in 2001, and Quality Assessor for the quality assessment exercise in Economics of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Welsh Funding Councils and of the Higher Education Funding Council in England. He was a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society (RES), and Secretary of the RES Standing Conference of Heads of Department in Economics (CHUDE). He is currently Vice-Chair of the ESRC-funded Macroeconomics, Money and Finance Research Group. He has published as sole author or editor, as well as co-author and co-editor, a number of books, contributed in the form of invited chapters to numerous books, produced research reports for research institutes, and has published widely in academic journals.

JOHN MCCOMBIE is Director of the Centre for Economic and Public Policy and Fellow in Economics, Downing College, University of Cambridge, UK. He has previously held positions in Economics departments at the University of Hull and the University of Melbourne. His research interests include the study of national and regional growth disparities, economic growth and the balance-of-payments constraint, and criticisms of the aggregate production function and conventional measures of the rate of technical progress. He has published widely in these areas.