Comment on Chapters 5, 6 and 7

Abstract

Each of these three chapters deals with the inadequacies of measures of recorded unemployment. Taylor implicitly, and de Neubourg explicitly, suggest that we require a finer breakdown of unemployment data into categories which are useful for policy information. Any tool will be rough and ready and we are sure to be disappointed if we seek perfect idealised theoretical categories, empirically operational categories and politically useful categories of any economic variable. What needs to be demonstrated is that current methods can be improved upon and that these alternatives prove useful to some degree, for theoretical, empirical and policy analysis. Both Taylor and de Neubourg make much of the shortcomings of U-V analysis but it is not easy to suggest an alternative. Neither writer seems to feel that input-output techniques may prove useful here.