Suchergebnisse

The global crisis has led to dramatic increases in unemployment rates over most of the countries of the OECD. This book provides alternative explanations of this phenomenon. Junankar begins with surveys of the labour market: labour demand, labour supply, and labour force participation. He argues that the growth of unemployment and long-term unemployment is mainly due to a lack of aggregated demand and not due to high unemployment benefits. Economics of the Labour Market shows that unemployment and long-term unemployment impose serious and significant costs on individuals, families, and society in general. Raja Junankar focuses on vital social issues arising from the malfunctioning of economies and this collection of essays tackles the real cost of unemployment

The paper analyses the problem of a skills shortage in Australia. It begins with an analysis of the operation of a labour market in terms of stocks and flows of labour services and human capital acquisition. It discusses the definition of a skills shortage, why it persists, and then looks at evidence from Australia, in particular, the resource rich states of Queensland and Western Australia over the past decade. It discusses possible employer responses to a skills shortage. Finally, it discusses whether the government should intervene, and if so what policies may help to relieve a skills shortage.

This paper investigates the ease with which recent immigrants to Australia from different countries and with different visa categories enter employment at an appropriate level to their prior education and experience in the source country. Unlike most of the earlier research in this field that studied the labour market status of migrants (probabilities of employment, or unemployment, or participation, or wage equation) this paper focuses on the quality of job that the migrant obtains on arrival in Australia. We provide alternative definitions of what is a good job in terms of objective and subjective criteria. The paper uses two sets of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia data: the first cohort that arrived in 1993-95 and the second cohort that arrived in 1999-2000. In particular we would study how changes in social security legislation in 1997, (two year waiting period for eligibility for benefits) affected the quality of job held by new migrants. In comparing the behaviour of migrants in the labour market with and without access to social security benefits we would study whether migrants are more likely to accept bad jobs after the legislative changes. The paper uses bivariate probit models to estimate the probabilities of holding a good job in terms of the usual human capital and demographic variables (including the visa category for entry into Australia). Our results suggest that the policy change had a positive impact on the probability to find a job but a negative impact to hold a good job.