ABSTRACT
More than twenty years ago Gunnar Myrdal, the famous Swedish economist and Nobel prize winner, wrote an essay on the welfare state in which he pointed out that the greatest step so far on the path to a real welfare state had been the achievement of full employment. And he continued that the people in the Western industrial nations would never permit a reappearance of high unemployment.1 And as late as 1969 a representative international conference of economists discussed in London the question whether business cycles are a thing of the past.2 Only a few years later these ideas and questions had been overtaken by reality. Unemployment as a serious economic and social problem is omnipresent; with more than thirty million unemployed in Western Europe and North America it has reached a level which would have been regarded as unbelievable ten years ago.
