Is "Full Employment" a Realistic Target or an Illusion?

The CDU's election campaign announcement of plans to further cut unemployment to achieve full employment by 2025 has revived the discussion over this topic. What is meant by "full employment"? Can and should this goal be achieved? Enzo Weber, Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, and University of Regensburg, explains that full employment is achieved when all individuals who can and want to work can get a job, although "can get" does not necessarily mean that they "have" a job at all times. Individuals may become unemployed when an employment relationship ends or individuals enter the labour market from the education system, abroad or inactivity. Since job-seekers do not possess all of the information on the labour market, it usually takes them a certain period of time to find a new job. For Weber it is not a realistic goal to reduce frictional unemployment at any price. A certain degree of unemployment can be reconciled with full employment, although there is no consensus as to how high this figure is. However, even unemployment of 2-3% remains a distant goal at the moment. But full employment need not remain a utopian vision. Holger Schäfer and Jörg Schmidt, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln, point out that neither "full employment" nor "unemployment" is clearly defined. A look at the labour market in Germany also very quickly reveals that the mismatch between the supply of and demand for qualifications is the biggest challenge. This primarily applies to the segment of persons without professional training. It would seem logical to reduce this mismatch with corresponding efforts to increase the number of qualified individuals. There are fairly good chances that this can be achieved. For Annelie Buntenbach, Federation of German Trade Unions, the target of "full employment" is ambitious, but not impossible. The key to success lies in fighting long-term unemployment and creating "good" jobs with pay based on a collective agreements. Alexander Spermann, University of Freiburg, sees full employment as a realistic target, but thinks that a clear strategy is needed to achieve it. The German government's demographic strategy is ground-breaking in that it is based on the idea of a growing "labour pie": the more elderly persons, women and immigrants that work, the higher employment, and thus growth, will be if employment falls. In the last legislative period, however, several false incentives were introduced. Lifelong learning is also crucial. But merely increasing expenditure on education does not go far enough: fresh potential for improvements in education and further training created by digital education needs to be exploited.