At the end of the 1980s, almost a quarter of the labour force in Amsterdam was without a job. This was about twice the Dutch national average. In the 1970s and the early 1980s, the unemployment rates of Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole, differed only slightly. Among the unemployed in Amsterdam, the proportion of members of the minority population rose considerably. Remarkably enough, the strong divergence manifested itself at a time when employment in Amsterdam began to increase for the first time in almost 20 years. This paper tries to find explanations for this urban paradox by using the mismatch approach. This approach turns out to be insufficient to explain the Amsterdam unemployment problem.
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