Low unemployment, low inflation, high growth - as Rodney Smith reports Europe's economies are learning to follow the American example.

No doubt about it - there are more jobs around.

Unemployment is still falling in the United States and the big European Union economies.

The rate of growth of jobs in the US is alarming the politicians and economists who believe that there is a natural and healthy level of joblessness. If the rate falls below that, they theorise, wage demands start to increase, pushing up inflation.

That is to an extent what happened to the developed world in the 1960s and 1970s. But it doesn't have to happen again.

France, Germany on the up

In France, for example, unemployment is falling, but wage demands are also being depressed by the shorter, 35-hour, working week.

It's a similar story in Germany. Unemployment is shrinking, slowly, and from a high level, and with one exception, wage demands have been within limits.

The exception is scaring economic planners. The hugely powerful IG Metall industrial trades union is pressing for a 5.5% pay increase. Inflation in Germany is expected to be 1.5% this year.

But the general picture in Europe and the United States is of falling unemployment, even to below recent average levels in the US and Britain, and little sign of wage inflation pressure.

Remember the 1960s?

It looks like the ultimate golden scenario. It could be, because it has happened before.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, near full employment was the accepted norm, and inflation was under control.

Things changed in the 1960s when post war full employment consensus economics was passing into its second generation.

Sociologists have shown that the breakdown was a characteristic of societies in flux, not necessarily an economic concomitant of a contented workforce.

Much of Margaret Thatcher's economic stringency damaged the British economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s - it did strangle inflation, but at the cost of jobs.

The Anglo-Saxon solution, europeanised

It was the so-called Anglo-Saxon solution, disliked by France, and to an extent, Germany.

But even France has been through an evolved example of Thatcher belt-tightening -- called "meeting the criteria for European monetary union."

Now it appears to be aiming for a more modern version of the post war full-employment consensus, based on social tools like the minimum wage and the 35-hour working week.

This has been derided by Britain and the United States - but French productivity has been growing, unemployment is falling and inflation appears to be under control.

It is possible that we are seeing the evolution of a variation on a millennium consensus towards fuller employment in Europe.