IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v29y2005i6p975-995.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Long-term unemployment, the invention of 'hysteresis' and the misdiagnosis of structural unemployment in the UK

Author

Listed:
  • David Webster

Abstract

This paper investigates the empirical basis for the belief that unemployment makes people less 'employable', and that the existence of a pool of long-term unemployed people is therefore in itself a barrier to full employment. Drawing on data for Great Britain from the 1940s to the present day, it shows that this idea has arisen through misinterpretations of the statistical evidence. The resulting policies, besides diverting resources from the demand-side programmes appropriate to the true situation of structural unemployment, appear to have created a problem of the kind they were intended to address, by encouraging unemployed people to move onto sickness benefits. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • David Webster, 2005. "Long-term unemployment, the invention of 'hysteresis' and the misdiagnosis of structural unemployment in the UK," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 29(6), pages 975-995, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:29:y:2005:i:6:p:975-995
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bei082
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Davide Romaniello, 2022. "Unemployment gap, isteresi e disoccupazione di lunga durata: quale ruolo nella comprensione dell'inflazione? (Unemployment gap, hysteresis and long-term unemployment: which role in explaining inflatio," Moneta e Credito, Economia civile, vol. 75(299), pages 267-283.
    2. Ochsen, Carsten, 2008. "How the distribution of unemployment by duration affects the unemployment rate," Thuenen-Series of Applied Economic Theory 88, University of Rostock, Institute of Economics.
    3. Di Domenico, Lorenzo & Gahn, Santiago José & Romaniello, Davide, 2024. "Testing the Waters of Positive Hysteresis: The Effects of Autonomous Demand Shocks on Inflation, Accumulation, and Labor in the US Economy," Centro Sraffa Working Papers CSWP64, Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione "Piero Sraffa".
    4. Paternesi Meloni, Walter & Romaniello, Davide & Stirati, Antonella, 2022. "Inflation and the NAIRU: assessing the role of long-term unemployment as a cause of hysteresis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 113(C).
    5. David Webster, 2019. "Benefit sanctions, social citizenship and the economy," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 34(3), pages 316-326, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:29:y:2005:i:6:p:975-995. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.