Description:
A recent VOX article by M. Fioramanti and R. Waldmann criticises the way the European Commission estimates the unemployment gap for EU countries and especially the gap for Italy. This economic brief refutes the criticism and, in turn, argues that the implicitly suggested approach from Fioramanti and Waldmann for estimating the unemployment gap leads to results which, firstly, are problematic on purely economic grounds and, secondly, have dubious statistical properties.