Unemployment in Advanced Capitalism

For much of the post-World War II period, the United States routinely had rates of unemployment higher than those in Western Europe. This pattern has been reversed in the 1980s; in 1984, the U.S. suffered with 7.4 percent unemployment: hardly an impressive figure for what was supposed to be a year of great economic expansion. However, all of the major countries of Western Europe (the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, and Italy) had even higher rates of unemployment. In Belgium and the N...