Measuring the NAIRU in the Spanish Economy

This paper addresses the issue of measuring the NAIRU in the Spanish economy. We implement some of the procedures proposed in the literature to estimate the NAIRU, describing their advantages and disadvantages. Our analysis shows that these alternative approaches provide significantly different point estimates of the NAIRU. Moreover, whenever some measures of the precision of the estimate are available, the degree of uncertainty is remarkable. Thus, our main conclusion is that the usefulness of the NAIRU concept as a general guideline for discussing and analyzing macroeconomic policy is very limited, given the current state of economic research on this area.