In the UK, unemployment is at its lowest for almost half a century, but large numbers of people have chosen to drop out of the workforce. In the eurozone, the jobless rate is the lowest since the creation of the single currency. In the US, acute labour shortages have created a jobseekers’ market — although wages are still lagging behind inflation.
The problems in labour markets look very different from when Christopher Pissarides, regius professor of economics at the LSE and a former adviser to the Cypriot and Greek governments, began his academic career in the 1970s — a time when governments were struggling to get to grips with a new era of mass unemployment.
But for Pissarides — who won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for his work on friction in labour markets — many of the answers are similar.