An agenda for unemployment research: a challenge for public health.

Unemployment figures are high worldwide, and this should be a challenge for both researchers and politicians. Public health research has a tradition of descriptive studies among the unemployed at the individual level and has to a limited extent been engaged in interventive and preventive trials to study the effect of different measures to counter unemployment. The article gives a brief review of the development of postwar unemployment research and proposes an agenda for unemployment research within public health for the coming years.