IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-27393-5_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Rise of Unemployment and Working Poverty: An Evolutionary Macroeconomic Perspective

In: Growth, Employment and Inflation

Author

Listed:
  • John Foster

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed a steady increase in the underlying rate of unemployment in OECD countries. At the same time, there has been a parallel increase in the numbers of working poor. Gottschalk (1997) has reported that, in the United States, those in the lower half of the earnings distribution were significantly worse off in an absolute sense in 1994, compared to 1973. Over the same period, the poverty rate rose by 31 per cent even though US mean real per capita income increased by 27 per cent. In other words, the poverty-reducing effect of economic growth was more than offset by increasing inequality. Only those in the top 20 per cent of the earnings distribution were better off in 1994 compared to 1973. Similar tendencies exist in other OECD countries, although the unemployment/working poverty mix varies, depending on the particular institutional and regulatory arrangements in different countries.

Suggested Citation

  • John Foster, 1999. "The Rise of Unemployment and Working Poverty: An Evolutionary Macroeconomic Perspective," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Mark Setterfield (ed.), Growth, Employment and Inflation, chapter 14, pages 195-210, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-27393-5_14
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27393-5_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:pal:palchp:978-1-349-27393-5_14. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    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.