Unemployment, oil prices and the real interest rate:evidence from Canada and the UK

There is still little agreement about what caused the large movement in unemployment in the industrialized nations in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper constructs a simple model in which the equilibrium rate of unemployment depends upon the real rate of interest and the real price of oil. When confronted with data from Canada and the UK, there is some support for the model''s predictions. Granger-casualty tests and regression results suggest that the real oil price is especially important. If a dynamic model is estimated up to the start of the 1980s, it successfully predicts (out of a sample) the behaviour of unemployment over the ensuing period. Nevertheless, an unexplained secular trend in unemployment is visible in the data.