An index of unemployment slack

This paper proposes a way of measuring insufficient employment that incorporates underemployment duration as an integral part. The index of labour slack (ILS) is built as the distance between individual labour slacks and the ideal distribution with no slacks. The resulting formula is intuitive and easy to compute. It can be expressed as the product of two terms, one measuring the incidence and the other a combination of intensity and persistence. A simplified version permits a direct application using conventional labour force surveys as reference.