Beveridge's analysis of unemployment in 1909: the reserve of labour

Jocelyn Poirel

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2014, vol. 21, issue 3, 448-466

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a rational reconstruction of Beveridge's theory of unemployment published in 1909. First and foremost, it shows that his theory of unemployment is coherent - what Beveridge refers to as 'the reserve of labour' represents 'unemployment' as a whole; unemployment is due to the imperfection of the labour market and associated friction and the organisation of the labour market is necessary. Second, it suggests that as early as 1909, a negative relationship already existed between unemployment and job vacancies and that the segmentation of the labour market and imperfect information are key factors of friction. The first part of the paper provides a reconstruction of Beveridge's theory of the reserve of labour (1909) including causes and factors of unemployment and unemployment policies. The second part shows that certain founding principles of the 'Beveridge curve' (Beveridge 1944 [1953]) were already to be found in his 1909 book and that links can be established between Beveridge (1909), Phelps (1970) and Pissarides (2000).

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2012.683026 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:21:y:2014:i:3:p:448-466

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2012.683026

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().