Europe's notoriously high level of unemployment is one of the big puzzles of empirical macroeconomics. In recent years the unemployment rate has fallen in The Netherlands, but the overall level in OECD Europe remains high. An investigation into why Dutch economic policy has been relatively effective could be useful for the unemployment debate in Europe. This book contributes to this investigation with its empirical analysis covering three important topics. The first part of the book investigates whether (macro) economic policies could be effective in reducing unemployment in the short term. The second part goes on to discuss the high rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers, followed by an investigation of the persistence of unemployment. Since the early 1980s, Dutch policymakers have employed wage moderation as a remedy for unemployment in The Netherlands. Substantial cutbacks were made in the social security programme. This had a moderating effect on wages, which is thought to have contributed to employment growth. However, unemployment remained rather high up to 1997. Why didn't unemployment fall more quickly? To answer these questions, economists have developed different structural macroeconometric models. The Netherlands has a rich tradition in using macroeconomic models for policy analysis. This tradition originates in the work of Jan Tinbergen, Nobel laureate in economics, and the first director of CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. This book, which builds on CPB's broad experience with macroeconomic modelling, makes an important contribution to this fine Dutch tradition.