Editing Unemployment (section)

===Structural unemployment===
{{Main|Structural unemployment}}
[[File:Okuns law quarterly differences.svg|thumb|[[Okun's Law]] interprets unemployment as a function of the rate of growth in GDP.]]
[[Structural unemployment]] occurs when a labour market is unable to provide jobs for everyone who wants one because there is a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed workers and the skills needed for the available jobs. Structural unemployment is hard to separate empirically from frictional unemployment except that it lasts longer. As with frictional unemployment, simple demand-side stimulus will not work to abolish this type of unemployment easily.

Structural unemployment may also be encouraged to rise by persistent cyclical unemployment: if an economy suffers from longlasting low aggregate demand, it means that many of the unemployed become disheartened, and their skills (including [[job hunting|job-searching]] skills) become "rusty" and obsolete. Problems with debt may lead to [[homelessness]] and a fall into the vicious cycle of poverty, which means that people affected in this way may not fit the job vacancies that are created when the economy recovers. The implication is that sustained ''high'' demand may ''lower'' structural unemployment. This theory of persistence in structural unemployment has been referred to as an example of [[path dependence]] or "[[hysteresis]]".

Much ''[[technological unemployment]]'',<ref name="Jerome 1934"/> caused by the replacement of workers by machines might be counted as structural unemployment. Alternatively, technological unemployment might refer to the way in which steady increases in labour productivity mean that fewer workers are needed to produce the same level of output every year. The fact that aggregate demand can be raised to deal with the problem suggests that the problem is instead one of cyclical unemployment. As indicated by [[Okun's law]], the demand side must grow sufficiently quickly to absorb not only the growing labour force but also the workers who are made redundant by the increased labour productivity.

Seasonal unemployment may be seen as a kind of structural unemployment since it is linked to certain kinds of jobs (construction and migratory farm work). The most-cited official unemployment measures erase this kind of unemployment from the statistics using "seasonal adjustment" techniques. That results in substantial and permanent structural unemployment.