Written by leading experts in the field, this book provides a broad survey of unemployment. Explaining what has happened to employment levels in the industrialized countries in the 1970s and 1980s, the authors discuss why unemployment is so high and why it has fluctuated so wildly, how unemployment affects inflation, and whether full employment can ever be combined with price stability. For each issue it develops a relevant theory, followed by extensive empirical analysis, drawing on material from both Europe and America.

Richard Layard is one of Britain's foremost applied economists, whose work has had a profound impact on the policy debate in Britain and abroad. This book contains his most influential articles on education, equality and income distribution and on the lessons of economic transition in Eastern Europe. It is published along with a companion volume. Inequality argues that lifetime inequality is the basic inequality we should worry about. In this context education is a powerful instrument of redistribution, as well as a national investment. Cash redistribution has efficiency costs which can be...