[Excerpt] Like its predecessors, this 1999 Report serves two main purposes. The first is to provide a comprehensive report on recent developments in employment in Europe. This year’s Report takes this first aspect somewhat further and looks at the ups and downs of employment performance in recent years, not only in the Union but also in the United States and Japan. One notable and disturbing fact is that, despite the success of some individual Member States in improving their performance over recent years, employment in the Union as a whole in 1998 had still not regained the level of 1991 before the onset of the recession in the early 1990s.