Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index In economics, full employment means no unemployment or underemployment, or, alternatively, no unemployment above the level of natural unemployment. The active pursuit of national full employment through interventionist government policies is associated with Keynesian economics and marked the postwar agenda of many Western nations, until the stagflation of the 1970s. Australia was the first country in the world in which full employment in a free society was made official policy by its government. On May 30, 1945, The Australian Labor Party Prime Minister John Curtin and his Employment Minister John Dedman tabled a white paper in the Australian House of Representatives titled Full Employment In Australia, the first time any government apart from totalitarian regimes had unequivocally committed itself to providing work for any person who was willing and able to work. Conditions of full employment lasted in Australia from 1941 to 1975. Ideas associated with the Phillips curve have questioned the possibility and value of full employment in a society. There has also been criticism of full employment policies by many economists, particularly by monetarists such as Milton Friedman who believe that full employment decreases productivity and efficiency and helps cause inflation. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.