Unemployment duration and the measurement of unemployment

We propose a framework in which the welfare bases of various unemployment measures available in the literature can be analyzed and a decomposition of these measures can be made into aggregate unemployment and the concentration of its distribution. A set of axioms for an unemployment measure is then introduced, which relate to the sensitivity of an unemployment measure to the inequality in the distribution of the unemployment. An unemployment measure is derived on the basis of these axioms that captures the distributional considerations in the measurement of unemployment.