Chronic Unemployment: A New Concept for Capturing Weak Labor Market Attachment

In this article, we develop, unfold, and explore the concept of ‘chronic unemployment’ to capture a segment that is weakly attached to the labor market because of repeated spells of unemployment, interrupted only by shorter intervals of temporary employment, inactivity, and/or participation in active labor market policy measures (ALMP). We do this to capture this segment more adequately than conventional long-term unemployment statistics. We analyze unemployment trajectories of chronically unemployed individuals across different labor market and welfare regimes over more than 10 years based on longitudinal and comparable register data in Denmark, Germany, and Finland. We find that in these developed welfare states, unemployment of a more chronic character is a much wider problem than what conventional statistics reveal, and that sustainable integration into gainful employment at the open labor market is a distant goal for a considerable share of the group.