BRITISH UNEMPLOYMENT - LETTER FROM AMERICA

This paper asks whether there are any lessons to be learned about unemployment in Britain from the US experience. The fundamental issues to be addresed are embodied in data showing that the relative unemployment performance of Britain and the US reversed itself between the 1960s and the 1980s. The immediate candidates as explanations for these factors are the changing priorities of government macroeconomic policies. Governments in the past 15 yr have placed greater weight on minimising price inflation and considerably less weight on reducing unemployment than they did four decades ago. Government macroeconomic policies appear more relevant as an explanation for movements in unemployment over the business cycle than as an explanation for the upward trend in unemployment over four decades. -from Author