Given that for France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands the unemployment rates are best classified as I(1), we apply permanent-transitory decompositions based on cointegrated VARs with relevant variables (labor productivity, wages, tax wedges, foreign relative prices) to estimate the time-varying natural unemployment rates. In general all variables seem to matter, and the results are quite different from published OECD Nairus. Our implied unemployment gaps are better than the OECD gaps in

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... dicting unemployment changes and inflation gaps, but they are (except for Italy) as bad as the OECD gaps for forecasting inflation changes.