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 the subject of unemployment. It is published along with a companion volume Inequality , which deals with these topics and with economic transition. Unemployment explains what causes unemployment and proposes remedies to reduce it. There is a strong focus on how unemployed people are treated and how this affects unemployment - including Layard's well-known recommendation of a job-guarantee for long term unemployed people. Other key topics covered are the effect of unions and wage bargaining, the effect of low skill, and the possible role of rigid employment laws. The book opens with Richard Layard's personal credo Why I became an Economist .

Youth have always had higher unemployment rates – about twice or more than the average – as they are usually the last to be hired in an expansion and the first to be let go in a recession. In addition, young people engage in extensive job searching in their early years, and this can imply considerable job churning as both youth and employers look for a good match. This highlights the importance of facilitating the school-to-work transition and having early interventions to assist such youth before negative conditions set in. It also highlights the potential importance of determining those young people most “at risk” of long-term unemployment, and of targeting or streaming them into programmes that will yield the largest incremental net benefits given their characteristics. Unemployed youth without previous work experience often are not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits when they first enter the labour market. When they do receive job search assistance, they often face a bewildering array of programmes that are available to assist them, often with little guidance to help them select the programs that best meet their needs. Consequently, ensuring that today’s youth do not become a “lost generation” is an urgent matter. George Bernard Shaw once said that it is too bad that “youth is wasted on the young”, implying that youth do not realize the opportunities they have as youth and only see them as they get older. There is a danger, however, that many of today’s youth may be never have those opportunities and hence not even see them with hindsight. This book and others in the ADAPT Labour Studies Book-Series are intended to deal with these challenges, to make sure that youth is not wasted on the young.

Argues the cause of unemployment may be the government itself Redefining the way we think about unemployment in America today, Out of Work offers devastating evidence that the major cause of high unemployment in the United States is the government itself.

First published in 1989, Combating Long-Term Unemployment follows on from, and is a companion to, Local Authorities and New Technologies. The book seeks to inform debate by analysing policy responses to the problem of long-term unemployment and by focusing on the role of local initiatives in a European context. Long-term unemployment in Europe is a complicated and multifaceted problem, the policy responses to which need to be studied against various contexts. It is designed to appeal to all those interested in policies to combat long-term unemployment: local and central government officials, private sector organizations whose work is relevant to locally based initiatives, and interested academics.