The scourge of unemployment has been roundly identified as one of the most pressing social and economic problem on the current political agenda. Much of Europe remains plagued by high levels of unemployment.

Although recent years have been characterised to some extent by improvements in the labour market performances it still remains a stumbling-block against which economists and politicians collide.

What seems hard interpreting and, at the same time, interesting to further investigate is why there are rather large cross-country differences in the labour market performances, and why such a phenomenon particularly affects specific population segments (adults and youngest). In addition the peculiarity that it concerns a large number of workers for rather long time periods makes this social burden even more difficult to tackle. Nor does empirical evidence give any straight verdict on the instruments able to handle such occurrence.

The conference aims at critically assessing both the orthodox and heterodox views to outline alternative explanations for cross-country trends in employment performance.

In particular the challenge of the conventional wisdom will be outlined through original quantitative contributions on the following topics: Active Labour Market Programmes, Wage Setting Policies, Working Hours and Working Time Organisation, Labour Market Participation and Employment Rate Migrations, "Gender" and "Age" specific Policies Aspects, Underground Economy and Unemployment, Impact of Monetary Policies on Unemployment, Economic Policies and Labour Market Outcomes (Relocation, Trade, Specialisation, Fiscal policies), International coordination, Evaluation and efficiency