No abstract

Recent developments in the European Union have raised immigration as an issue, especially in the UK. There has been a large wave of migrants into the UK from Poland since its accession in 2004, and as Romania and Bulgaria are preparing to become members of the European Union on 1 January 2007, migration from the new member states to other EU countries has become even more a focus of attention. Concerns over potential immigration towards the old EU member states have been rising because the total population of Bulgaria and Romania is approximately 30 million, a similar size to Poland, and the standards of living in both countries are considerably lower than in the EU-15 member countries, or than in any of the current New Member States. Hence outward migration is more likely to be attractive. The scale of flows will depend upon any restrictions that might be imposed by other member states, but current estimates suggest that 2 million Romanians, for instance, are already at work in the core EU countries.

This paper uses Growth Accounting and Production Function Analysis to decompose the factors behind differences in growth between the UK, France and Germany between 1992 and 2005. Most of the growth differential between the United Kingdom, Germany and France since 1993 can be explained by structural factors. The United Kingdom's higher growth has originated essentially in the finance and business sector, which is ICT-intensive. Germany's weak growth reflects in large part the aftermath of the unification shock and a continued fall in the labour input. At the same time there has been a sharp slowdown in knowledge accumulation, which seems to have restrained labour productivity growth. After EMU, the performance of German manufacturing improved relative to both France and the United Kingdom, while capital deepening became less supportive to growth because of lower investment in infrastructures and dwellings. France's higher growth relative to Germany since 1999 comes essentially from the non-tradable sectors and from a higher labour input. This may be partly related to a more significant decline in the volatility of real interest rates.

[eng] This paper analyses the causes of unemployment, in the long and in the short-run, in France and the United-States. Our empirical strategy consists of testing for short-run causality and for cointegration. The cointegration analysis seeks to establish whether there exists a common long-run path for each pair of series ; the short- run causality analysis seeks to establish whether one série contains information to predict changes in another série. Many macroeconomic time series can be characterized by persistence, i.e. by hysteresis, which implies that the effects of a shock on economic aggregates are long lasting, in that even small changes lead to large movements in the long term path. The results show that there exists no stable relationship between unemployment and real wages or labour costs, nor between unemployment and demographic aggregates or demand for goods. No causality was found for these pairs of series. On the other hand, we can identify short-term and long-term causality for unemployment rates and real long-run interest rates, both in France and the United States. These results are quite surprising and lead us to question most standard explanations of unemployment. [fre] Cet article présente une étude empirique exploratoire sur les déterminants du chômage, en courte comme en longue période, en France et aux Etats-Unis. Les méthodes statistiques utilisées sont celles de la cointégration, qui permet de déterminer si deux variables évoluent conjointement dans le temps, et de la causalité, qui détermine si une série chronologique contient les informations nécessaires à la prédiction de l'évolution d'une autre. La plupart des séries utilisées sont caractérisées par la propriété de persistance, ou encore par un phénomène d'hystérésis, qui implique que leur évolution n'est pas réversible. En d'autres termes, des chocs, même transitoires, laissent des traces permanentes sur l'évolution économique. Les résultats montrent qu'il n'existe pas de relations systématiques entre l'évolution du chômage et, d'autre part, celles des salaires réels, des coûts salariaux, des variables démographiques ou de la demande globale. Aucune causalité n'a pu être découverte entre ces variables. Par contre, il existe bien une relation entre l'évolution du chômage et celle des taux d'intérêt réels, à court comme à long terme, en France et aux Etats-Unis. Ces faits sont suffisamment surprenants pour inviter à reconsidérer les explications traditionnelles du chômage.

This paper uses Growth Accounting and Production Function Analysis to decompose the factors behind differences in growth between the UK, France and Germany between 1992 and 2005. Most of the growth differential between the United Kingdom, Germany and France since 1993 can be explained by structural factors. The United Kingdom's higher growth has originated essentially in the finance and business sector, which is ICT-intensive. Germany's weak growth reflects in large part the aftermath of the unification shock and a continued fall in the labour input. At the same time there has been a sharp slowdown in knowledge accumulation, which seems to have restrained labour productivity growth. After EMU, the performance of German manufacturing improved relative to both France and the United Kingdom, while capital deepening became less supportive to growth because of lower investment in infrastructures and dwellings. France's higher growth relative to Germany since 1999 comes essentially from the non-tradable sectors and from a higher labour input. This may be partly related to a more significant decline in the volatility of real interest rates.