Unemployment

Key concept indicators

• Identifies and uses, in context, concepts related to unemployment, such as:
  • different definitions of full employment and unemployment
  • types of involuntary unemployment such as structural, cyclical, frictional, and so on
  • nominal and real indicators, for example, nominal and real wages.
     
• Integrates changes shown on the production possibility frontier model into detailed explanations of causes of changes in unemployment.
• Uses the labour market supply and demand model to show equilibrium and disequilibrium positions and the resulting levels of employment and unemployment (involuntary and voluntary).
• Understands that institutional factors, for example, regulations or unions, and social influences, for example, discrimination or geographic immobility constraints (or rigidities), affect labour supply, labour demand, and/or real wages in ways that cause labour market disequilibrium to persist.
• Integrates the labour market supply and demand model into detailed explanations of causes of changes in unemployment.
• Integrates changes shown on the aggregate demand and aggregate supply model (that is, growth or decline in deflationary gap) into detailed explanations of causes of changes in unemployment.
• Compares and contrasts the impact of the different causes of changes in unemployment, for example, the introduction of youth wages and government-funded skills training for unemployed youths.
• Compares and contrasts the impacts of changes in unemployment on various groups in New Zealand society, including:
  • the government’s operating balance, for example, impacts on tax receipts, social welfare, and other government spending
  • firms, for example, levels of output
  • households, for example, self employment, migration, and the flow-on effects of social stresses caused by unemployment.

Last updated May 9, 2013

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