ABSTRACT
The fight against European unemployment has become in recent years one of the most debated and sensitive topics of political discussion at both the national and European level. However, although unemployment in Europe has been steadily increasing since the 1970s, and the European level of unemployment already overtook the US rate at the beginning of the 1980s (see Figure 9.1 below), the adoption of a common European approach to this problem happened only in 1993 with the White Paper on Growth and Employment and coincides with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty establishing EMU.
