Selective Use of Discretionary Public Employment and Economic Flexibility

Mathew Forstater
Additional contact information
Mathew Forstater: The Jerome Levy Economics Institute

Macroeconomics from EconWPA

Abstract: Full employment is normally associated with structuralrigidities that may result in production bottlenecks and inflationary pressures. Flexibility or elasticity of the production system istherefore a desirable feature of an economic system. Many standardmodels, however, exhibit flexibility because of the use of unacceptablyunrealistic assumptions. While unemployment and excess capacity areimportant real- life factors that endow economic systems with flexibility, the flexibility gained in this manner comes at a high social and economiccost. This paper explores these issues and proposes the selective use ofdiscretionary public employment as a means of promoting higher levels ofemployment--and even full employment--without creating structuralrigidities, resulting in negative enivronmental consequences, or causing undesirable geographic dislocation of workers.

JEL-codes: E (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv, nep-pbe, nep-pke and nep-pub
Date: 1998-02-10
Note: Type of Document - Acrobat PDF; prepared on IBM PC ; to print on PostScript; pages: 28; figures: included
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/mac/papers/9802/9802014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpma:9802014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Macroeconomics from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().