The main questions in the LFS are about employment status: do you have a job and, if not, are you looking for one? (If your answer to the second question is “yes” you are counted as unemployed, if “no”, economically “inactive”.) As well as these headline numbers,  the UK and the terms of trade have been broadly constant in recent years. Thus the only source of real wage growth, over time, is productivity growth. 4  The inverse relationship between the NAIRU and productivity growth has been noted in many countries (Staiger et al (2001), Slacacek (2005)) nor is real wage resistance the only possible reason for the link. More micro-founded approaches to the labour market, based on the costs of job search, also predict a negative relationship between trend productivity growth and the natural rate of unemployment. In that setting, in which employers trade off the cost of search against the prospective surplus from a new job, lower expected growth in productivity reduces the present value of that surplus and lowers the rate of job creation. The canonical description of this “capitalisation” effect is due to Pissarides (2000). BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  the ONS’s monthly labour market release publishes standard summary statistics about the duration of unemployment and the reasons for inactivity. But, at least since 1994, the LFS has also included a host of questions about the characteristics of employees and their jobs. These are listed in Table 1.
Christian Noyer: The eurosystem’s single monetary policy - a view from the inside Speech by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, at the GIC Conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, 18 January 2006. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, It is a great pleasure and honour for me to address the GIC conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Before entering into the heart of today’s topic, given the date of this conference, it would be difficult for me not to evoke the name and prodigious work of Benjamin Franklin who, to my mind, is the embodiment of the American dream. I could devote the whole of my address to Benjamin Franklin’s work, both because of its scope and the significance that it still has today, but that is not the subject of our conference. I shall therefore confine myself to recalling some of the major events and achievements in the life of this exceptional, intelligent man, endowed with extraordinary intellectual curiosity. If I were to sum up the life of this exceptional man in a few words, I would say, like most people, that he was an autobiographer, an essayist, a pamphleteer, a politician, a librarian, a publisher, an educationalist, a scientist, an inventor, a statesman, and a humorist. It is difficult to believe that one single man could be so multifaceted but Benjamin Franklin was all these things, and sometimes at the same time.