Mass unemployment: international experience and lessons for policy

While variations across countries in the experiences of mass unemployment have been extensively analysed, the even more striking variation over time is much less well understood. This paper argues that the capacity of a nation to maintain full employment by means of 'Keynesian' fiscal and monetary policies is constrained no longer so much by the need to contain inflationary pressures (where the wage setting arrangements of corporatist countries are an advantage) as by the growth of international trade and capital mobility. It is argued that traditional corporatist institutions are not well-suited to these developments.