The labour market and unemployment in Europe 15

Abstract

The current economic and financial crisis has had a negative effect all over the world. Nonetheless, this effect has not been the same one in all countries as some countries were more affected than others. This paper analyses the variations that the unemployment rate suffered in the countries that form the European Union 15. Apart from trying to explain how this rate fluctuates throughout a determined timeframe and observe if it converges back to its initial natural unemployment rate of if the so called hysteresis is produced. In order to be able to perform a correct analysis of these variations we carried out a study of temporal series through the application of unit roots tests and stationarity test. Moreover, we noticed how the rigidities of the labour market affect the convergence of the unemployment rate