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This paper investigates the effect of productivity growth on the non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) over the long run, using historically consistent time series for the UK from 1871 to 1999. A two‐equation model of unemployment and wage‐setting that incorporates productivity effects is estimated over the whole period, allowing for shifts associated with changes in labour market institutions. The results indicate that faster productivity growth reduces the NAIRU, but that this goes only part of the way towards explaining wide swings in average unemployment across the decades.

Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common European Asylum System. This paper seeks to shed light on what form this should take. It summarises the development of policy to date and it argues that these policies have been too tough, even from the point of view of EU citizens. Using an economic framework, it examines scenarios with different degrees of policy harmonisation and integration among EU countries. Finally, it argues that there is an important role for enhanced burden-sharing arrangements.

Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common European Asylum System. This paper seeks to shed light on what form this should take. It summarizes the development of policy to date and it argues that these policies have been too tough, even from the point of view of EU citizens. Using an economic framework, it examines scenarios with different degrees of policy harmonisation and integration among EU countries. Finally, it argues that there is an important role for enhanced burden-sharing arrangements.

The international labour market has not been ?globalised? to the same degree over the last 40 years as have international markets for goods and capital. Immigration policies in developed economies clearly hinder the mobility of labour. But how much difference does it actually make? This paper compares emigration from Britain to four principal destinations in the era of free migration before 1914 with emigration to the same places since the 1960s. As the doors were kept open to British emigrants for longer than most, the ?deglobalisation? of British labour only dates from the 1960s. Since that time there has been a secular fall in British emigration, and this has been a major component in the transformation of the UK from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. The same effects, applied to the later period, suggest that mass emigration from Britain should have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid 1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK.

Trade Boards were first established in 1909 principally to protect workers in the sweated trades'but were vastly extended under new criteria in 1918. Although the interwar Trade Boards set wage minima which were'tough'by modern standards there has been little analysis of their effects on employment. But in one sector, agriculture, there is clear evidence that minimum wage setting cost jobs. If similar effects occurred in other sectors covered by minimum wages then this could have added significantly to the burden of unemployment during the interwar years.

Recent studies suggest that the earnings of pre-1890 immigrants grew slowly compared with those of natives and imply that these immigrants did not assimilate well into the American labor market. Using data for Michigan and California this article estimates new specifications for immigrant and native-born earnings, and finds that immigrants who arrived as children had similar earnings profiles to the native-born. Immigrants who arrived as adults suffered an initial earnings disadvantage but their earnings grew faster than those of the native-born. These results are consistent with the traditional view that pre-1890 immigrants assimilated well.