Europe and employment: an analysis of the recent evolution

Abstract

The employment question is today a central axis of the difficulties in economic theory and policy. When Galbraith says that governments are now in a situation of impotency as to the coexistence of inflation and unemployment and when Samuelson says that anyone who succeeds in solving such a dilemma ought to be awarded the Nobel prize, they just express the meaning of a deep crisis that Joan Robinson names «crisis of the employment contents». It is within this context of a growing and almost inexplicable unemployment that one tries to  systematize and analyse the available information on the recent evolution of employment at the European level, naturally including not only the Europe of the EFTA and EEC but also that of the COMECON. Beyond the analysis of the recent evolution, which is the object of this first article, one intends to draw the main prospects for the employment and migrations, to be included in a second article. To finish, one will try,in a third article, to establish and discuss the set of problems put today to the articulation between the economic policy and the employment policy. The two first articles will therefore be essentially informative. The present text will comprise two main themes: employment in the Europe of the COMECON and employment in the Europe of the OECD, putting a special emphasis on the EEC. The employment analysis in the capitalist Europe, naturally, is that taking a larger space, since it is there that, forHhe moment, the main problems arise. The principal determinants of the evolution of the active population, the employment and the unemployment are indeed dealt here. Among the conclusions, one is specially significant: during a sixteen year period, the most important countries of the EEC felt, in the three years of high conjuncture, a rising evolution in the unemployment rate; the high conjuncture points are thus becoming far and far from the «full employment».