ABSTRACT
The United States and Canada achieved minimum unemployment rates of 3 percent and 3.5 percent. While the general profile of inflation and unemployment is similar in all three countries, there are differences in timing and amplitude of economic fluctuations, especially at the regional level. Cast in the terms, Australia had a more stable economy, and a more consistent policy than either the United States or Canada, although its peak rates of unemployment and inflation were much the same. Canada probably provides the strongest case for interpreting postwar fluctuations as shifting trade-off curves and/or cyclical loops whether at the national or the regional level. Toward the end of the 1960s the concept of Phillips curves or trade-off curves came in for attack, first on theoretical grounds, and later on empirical grounds. But a glance at the diagrams of trade-off curves and loops for the two countries reveals that in fact they are very different.
