The definition of "unemployment" is important here. it
An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as:
> someone aged 15 to 74 (in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway: 16 to 74 years);
> without work during the reference week;
> available to start work within the next two weeks (or has already found a job to start within the next three months);
> actively having sought employment at some time during the last four weeks.
> The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a percentage of the labour force.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
This means that any person which is currently not earning their keep, but not actively searching a job (because they are on the dole) will not be unemployed in these statistics. It also means that any person which is not earning their keep, but unable to take a job in the next two weeks because the are in a government job market program, will not be listed as unemployed in these statistics.
That's the standard definition for unemployment. An unemployed person is generally considered to be someone who would want to be employed, but is not. It is meant to be a measurement of the number of people who want jobs, but are unable to get them.
There are other measurements for labour force participation, which are usually fairly easy to find, and are a proportion of people who are legally able to work, against the number of actual workers.
It is as good a time as any to wish a pox on all jargon and reflect that a person with no employment is unlikely to be unemployed.
If anyone else is interested, a very light search into the history of when they picked that measure as the standard suggests it has been with us since ~1930. Apparently the nature of complaints hasn't changed much over the years.
I don't think you do the problem justice. Here are some people who fit the "no employment" metric but who we shouldn't count as "unemployed" if our goal is "anyone who wants a job, or needs a job to live without assistance, has one":
* A by-choice stay-at-home parent. There are like 10 million stay-at-home parents in the US (c.f., our entire labor force is ~125 million!)
* A contract worker/consultant, as well as employees in seasonal fields such as construction, many of whom make very decent 12-month wages but might be "unemployed" if you ask at the wrong moment.
* Anyone with a severe disability (mental or physical) which makes work difficult or impossible.
* Someone younger than retirement age (40s-50s) who has retired early by choice (e.g., no kids, dual high incomes for 20+ years, non-extravagant lifestyle; particularly relevant for this forum...)
If you counted all of these, I have no doubt our unemployment rate would at least double, if not triple. But that would be a ridiculously stupid number to even think about -- none of the above people want a job (or want a 12 month job); why should we try to organize society around forcing them to work when they don't need to and don't want to?!
I'm not claiming the current definition of "unemployed" is perfect, BTW. But IMO it's WAY better than yours...
The jargon exists because the category is useful in answering the question "how is the economy doing".
If we included people who are retired then we would see unemployment go up and down in correlation with generation sizes: when the baby boomers retire the number of "unemployed" people would go up dramatically. But that confuses the picture of whether businesses are hiring.
> but not actively searching a job (because they are on the dole)
Depends on the country, but in most to draw the dole you have to be "actively searching for a job" (at least in the sense that would count for these stats).
What this figure _would_ exclude would be retired people and those on permanent disability.
No - to be on the dole you need to be actively searching for a job in most jurisdictions in Europe. E.g. in the UK you need to go down to the job center every week and prove you're searching for a job in order to claim unemployment benefit. It's literally called jobseeker's allowance to reflect that.
Also what is a "government job market program"? Are you referring to a government employing people en masse to inflate the employment rate? You generally need taxes to do that so it's probably a legitimate approach.
1) most unemployed people are not entitled to any kind of allowance. There are big groups of unemployed people (women, people aged 50+, specialized workers eg constructor workers ) who have given up the hope to find a job except from some occasional paydays (most likely black labor) which they may find from word of mouth. They do not bother going to the "job center/unemployment office".
2) The unemployment office arranges for "training" where groups of unemployed people can attend. The attendants are paid like a 100-300e per month for 1-6 months. During these (otherwise useless) trainings these people are no longer considered unemployed and one can read these disgusting news titles "unemployment down to 30% from 31.5%".
I myself was never counted as an unemployed in Greece until I found my first position (in the UK as an engineer mind you... )
JSA is being replaced by universal credit. People on UC need to spend 35 hours per week on their job search, and they need to be able to demonstrate this.
> You should think of jobseeking as a full-time job. You will be expected to look or prepare for work for 35 hours a week, depending on your circumstances.
This requirement is robustly enforced.
I mention this because there are some people in the UK who think that unemployed people in the UK can get away with not doing anything.
"..some people in the UK who think that unemployed people in the UK can get away with not doing anything."
As someone who was unemployed for a while in the late 90's, it was possible. I believe the system is a lot stricter now but a lot of people base their ideas on past experience.
I have a friend who has been long-term unemployed due to health reasons. He has to attend courses and such from time to time, which he actually enjoys because he would like to work. He does a bit of voluntary work too.
The story all seems to be the same though, on the first day there are maybe 20 people who turn up and by the end of the week most of them have dropped out.
I don't know the facts but, just guessing, maybe there are still ways of playing the system?
Here's someone who was signed off work for heart problems. He had to have an independent medical (because DWP doesn't believe doctors) before he could claim disability benefits.
During the independent medical he had a heart attack. The healthcare professional had to stop the assessment and call for an ambo. The ambo staff arrived, and took him to hospital.
To you or me this is proof that he wasn't faking his heart problems and he is genuinely ill.
To the DWP it's failure to complete an assessment, and he was sanctioned for this non-completion.
In my experience, it is much more common that the job centre will refuse to believe those who are seeking work but can’t find it, than that people attempt to defraud the job centre.
If you don't get a job you're expected to take part in the Work Programme so no, people can't get away with doing nothing.
It's very hard to do undisclosed work because cash in hand work has been made much harder to get.
It's pretty hard to get away with doing nothing because your jobsearch is now online. You use DWP websites to record all your job searching. People may get away with it for a few weeks, but they're not going to get away with it for long.
We've heard a lot about the Hostile Environment. People think it just applies to Windrush, or maybe only to immigration. That's incorrect. It's a wide ranging policy and it fully applies to all benefits. That's why so many decisions are being overturned at first tier tribunal - the quality of decision making is piss poor and it's likely some of that is a deliberate choice.
I'm not saying it's widespread, nor necessarily that easy (I don't know) but every few weeks I'm looking at our local news online and there's a story of someone claiming jobseekers, housing benefit, disability or attendance allowances, and they're working (and paying taxes it seems, so it should have been easy to catch them).
Assuming not all cases are found - and stories I've seen in the past have been of people caught after well over a year of false claims - then it seems perfectly doable for those who are dishonest (through necessity or otherwise).
The rate of fraud on benefits is really low. Yes, it does happen, and a few people do get away with it for a long time. But it's wrong to suggest that it's widespread, and doing so causes harm because it encourages the Hostile Environment stuff.
Looking at your link, these people were caught reasonably quickly.
One of the people in your link managed to claim just £231. At his age he'd be getting £73 per week, so he fraudulently claimed less than a month.
It's harder to work out the other person, because they were also claiming housing benefit.
Let's take the one bedroom rate of £86.16 per week, plus £73.10 per week = £159.26 per week. (this assumes he claims as a single person, and it lowers the weekly amount. I do this because I want to maximise the time he claimed for as a worst case). £4,114 / £159 = = 25 weeks. So, about 6 months. If he was claiming the 2 bedroom rate, or was claiming JSA as a couple he would have got more moeny per week, and so was caught much quicker.
You'll find similar in the other cases. People try it and they usually get caught within a year.
I don't think I said it was widespread, or anything to indicate that? I've been on Jobseekers and am likely to be again: yes we should guard against creating a hostile environment and assuming everyone is on the make, but pretending there's no fraud at all is surely not the way.
Are few people dishonest, or are most dishonest people caught.
My concern is if the system encourages moral compromise for survival and what this means for our society as a whole.
> currently not earning their keep, but not actively searching a job (because they are on the dole) will not be unemployed
Why? If you are on the dole but without any disability or other commitment, you are considered "available to start work", no? Being available is one of the typical conditions for getting unemployment benefits.
> unable to take a job in the next two weeks because the are in a government job market program, will not be listed as unemployed
That's true, and it's one of the reasons why it's not super meaningful to try to compare and interpret these figures without any additional information.
This is how the BLS U3 statistic is arrived at. The U3 is the federal-level unemployment figure that is most commonly pointed to.
The U3 specifically does not include discouraged workers, those who are underemployed, or those who simply aren't looking.
As long as we are comparing apples to apples (i.e., these figures are all indicative of the same basic data with the same restrictions), there's no issue comparing them.
Some countries' job centers put jobless people into bullshit training courses that do nothing for them, but being in a course means you are not counted as "looking"/"available" for a while. Other countries do not do this.
The "same restrictions" apply, but countries in the first category will have fewer "unemployed" people even if they have the same number of discouraged/underemployed/jobless/whatever people.
> but being in a course means you are not counted as "looking"/"available" for a while
Are there enough people to whom that distinction applies to be more than statistical noise relative to the other regional variations that would have an impact?
Seems like a minor nit to pick in the grand scheme of things.
They claim 250,000 hidden unemployed for 220,000 "official" unemployed for Q1 2013, i.e., the official figures would be off by a factor of more than 2. But they don't say how many of those hidden unemployed are in training courses. Maybe the full study does say, I can't be bothered.
Yes it is, since those countries allow people to claim unemployment while not looking for work (via a rather silly rigmarole way of doing so, but still). At the sharp end, there are fewer people in that country who want a job (whether because they'll lose their unemployment if they don't get one or otherwise) and can't get it.
All that is true for the unemployment rate itself. It just means that the unemployment rate is not a useful proxy for a country's economic health, as it is often taken to be.
I thought that in most countries, if you are on the dole, you must search for work if you are capable, or you get a severe reduction in your financial support.
There are some people that have just given up on finding a job; they're able and willing to work, but because of reasons they can't find a job. Those might be on the dole, but they might also be able to survive off of a single income.
These stats should have a category "wants to work but can't find any, and is not entitled to benefits". Or "Able to work but doesn't need to because rich".
In my country if you are on a dole and the bureau of employment finds a job for you (usually not very nice job) - you have to take it or have a good reason why you can't (health for example). If you don't - you're left on your own.
Also, unemployment benefits end after 6 months no matter what.
There are other social benefits unrelated to employement (for example for kids from poor families, etc), but in principle - yes.
Now it's not so bad, you can find a job if you really want (it might be bad, but it's there). In 90s we had 20% unemployment and almost no social benefits. It was rough.
Which sounds fair, you can still apply for jobs in your sector while you're on the other job. But doing something is usually better than doing nothing, even if it's unqualified work and doesn't pay well.
Underemployment reports in the US include those people. They usually also include people working part-time "for economical reasons". But that's considered underemployment, not unemployment.
Curious how they are using colourisation in the opposite way. They have the low levels of unemployment as orange with the darker shades as the lowest and use blue for higher levels of unemployment, again the darker shades to indicate the highest employment.
So the concerning area's show as blue and the ok area's show as panic inducing Orange instinctively. Most odd.
German perspective: Wow, what a dramatic shift in Eastern Germany! Maybe it is just a general upwards trend in Germany with little room for improvement in Southern Germany, but it might also be the beginning of the end of Eastern Germany's under performance. I will certainly investigate further.
I am from Brandenburg originally and am very surprised that Berlins unemployment rate is higher than Brandenburg's?!
I checked statista[1][2] and indeed, it is. When I grew up it was around 18%.
People moving away from the countryside to cities could be a big factor. That leaves rural areas with a lot of older folks (that don't count as unemployed) while jobseekers are in bigger cities. Why should you be unemployed in rural Brandenburg when you could as well move to Berlin where there's a higher chance for a job? That could also explain why the rate in Northeastern Germany has decreased that much, both areas are mostly rural.
I think it could do with an extra dimension for eastern Germany, e.g. wages or relative wealth; having low unemployment is good, but if there's a big wage / wealth discrepancy between east and west there's still room for improvement.
I would expect that the discrepancy that matters - wages vs. cost of living - has much bigger difference if you go from East Germany to Poland, Czech Republic or Slovakia, rather than in comparison to West Germany. I.e. purchasing power drops much more when you go east, compared to going west.
Two days ago I was watching a German TV show in which the panelists discussed the low-wage-job boom: apparently unemployment is very low (5.6%) but an unhealthy portion of the jobs people are working are low-wage and/or exploitative of labor, and thus not really contributing to long-term social stability.
If too many people are working minimum wage and the minimum wage isn't realistic then sooner or later you have a big problem paying for social services.
(In Germany it's 8.84 EUR per hour but has only existed for a few years and I gather there's a lot of noncompliance.)
So, interesting map, but only telling part of the story.
While I agree it is still a much bette situation than in Italy or Spain. Germany is relatively cheaper than France and has better infrastructure. Having a low paying job gets your feet somewhere.
Not having any employability in Spain or Italy is going to be a tough problem.
The crux is that welfare payouts need to be wholly discontinued in order for UBI to make sense -- the intention is that UBI replaces a unmaintainable patchwork with a universal safety net. Having both doesn't make economic sense and only causes confusion and financial pain.
One of the main risks of a minimum wage is suppressing the employment rate of less-skilled, less-experienced workers. If the minimum wage is too high, it's uneconomic to take on staff who don't deliver enough value for the business. The reduced rates for young people and apprentices exist to reduce this stifling effect - without them, you'd make it uneconomic for businesses to take a chance on new employees who might need a lot of training or support.
This does of course create a secondary risk of businesses laying off older staff in favour of young people and "apprentices", but I haven't seen any clear evidence that this is a widespread problem.
If you've never seen any evidence of that, you've not looked very hard: This is what every supermarket does for their filler jobs, and to a lesser extent for their till and other store facing jobs as well. If you're over 18, you have to be very lucky to keep your job (or more realistically, to keep being given work) in such a situation.
Outside of supermarkets this sort of practice is also pretty entrenched in a lot of small-medium IT businesses: They have a sizeable portion of their workforce as trainees or whatever (they may be underpaid legally, so they almost always are) and don't hire them after their time is up (ever, as a rule). New trainees are then cycled into the slots that are now vacant.
It's to do with employment rates and avoiding financial damage to small/low margin businesses, there's a commission of some kind that tries to work out the maximum viable level.
Why pay? A much more reasonable solution is to pretend that subtle systemic connections don't exist between all agents in society, and just let them suffer and die.
Sure, long term, that might lead to even bigger problems, but on the other hand, long-term is not NOW.
Careful not to fall into the mental trap of comparing with an imaginary situation. No one has ever achieved 100% employment without involving gunpoint; you have to decide between the real world alternatives. Namely: is it better to have more people on social assistance, or more people on very low wage? (Of course, here in Germany it's mixed - you get lots of social assistance based on your income level. Plus, "better" is a tricky word to pin down...)
It's certainly too early to declare "mission accomplished", but people actually going to work and actually earning their own money, rather than being clients in a welfare system, is tremendously important for long-term social stability.
true, but things like wages and social standards are other statistics.
Additionaly to the mentioned "low-wage-job" boom you have to mention part-time employment.
Which does count as employment but doesn't result in the usual 40h+/week.
At least in Germany these things are connected, in that keeping people employed part-time, and not using fixed hours, serves to transfer risk from the employer to the employee, thus further undermining long-term social stability. Not to be too anti-capitalist about it, but one of the reasons societies grant rights to corporations is that they are supposed to move risk away from the workers and thus improve the buffer of economic stability. Obviously it doesn't always work like that in practice.
IANAStatistician, just pointing out that "hey look 5% unemployment" can be a very misleading statistic to use for laypersons.
There are groups of people that, through no fault of their own, are less productive. Maybe they are young and inexperienced just out of school, maybe they are older and have lower stamina, maybe they are rooted in a region where it is costlier and more difficult for businesses to operate, maybe they are a visible minority and are made less efficient by other people’s discriminatory treatment, maybe they have a difficult family situation affecting them at work, maybe they only have experience in industries where margins are thin because of foreign competition or maybe they are innately just not good at the type of activities that are profitable in today’s world.
Central banks affect job creating investment through interest rates. It may seem like small interest rate changes wouldn’t make a big difference for anyone once the effect propagates and is diluted across the whole economy. However, looking at it through the lens of cost of capital where businesses decide to do projects or not based on the expected profitability relative to borrowing costs, it is easy to see that the effect is highly unequal. This type of calculation implies a threshold, a cutoff where activities under a certain level of profitability are completely stopped. The fact that interest rates act as a threshold with regards to investment entails shutting down all lower margin activities, those that tend to be manned by people that are naturally disadvantaged.
This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having a job.
The investment in equipment and buildings necessary to perform their work disappears. Major projects get cancelled in isolated and disadvantaged rural areas. Entry level positions that would be manned by the less experienced disappear. Jobs that require less education also go away.
People who, in good times are already paid less and have little capacity to bear a fall in revenue, don’t just bear a proportionate drop but a complete fall to zero with often only meager government welfare to fall back on. On top of the hit to dignity, it atrophies their skills and makes them further disadvantaged and vulnerable. In the next cycle, they’re likely to again be the first to be cutoff.
It’s difficult to overstate the utter cruelty of monetary mismanagement.
>This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having a job.
Europe has been running rock-bottom interest rates since the 2008 crash. The ECB are charging 0% on MRO lending and offering -0.4% on deposits. The BoE have just increased rates from 0.25% to 0.5% in late 2017 due to rising inflation. Both banks have spent most of the last decade flooding the markets with money through QE.
Zero is not rock bottom. A lot of stores of value have negative returns. Zero is high in a lot of contexts.
Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.
Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free, liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for most of history. This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most things require maintenance to keep their worth.
The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real returns were easy to find. The recency effect probably explains some of the confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.
While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases, you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time, many can’t seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term assets. In nature, squirrels’ nut caches have a certain percentage of losses from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.
What we're seeing in this map I think is not just your everyday failure of monetarism (trying to control and balance out complex economies with only a single variable which is also an extremely heavy, blunt tool - interest rates). I think the problem is deeper, being a combination of a) misguided treaties based on bad economics (some would call it 'neoliberalism') like the so-called "Stability and Growth Pact" (which actually restricts member state's ability to deal with financial crises) and the way the ECB has been set up to not make fiscal transfers between states (or the equivalent, directly buying bonds from member states), and b) the madness of fixed exchange rates between the member states, by having a common currency without a federal budget.
It mostly comes down to the Euro - what we see with countries with flexible exchange rates is that their economies don't have to internally devalue with changes in inflation, terms of trade, etc. because the exchange rates changes and just balances it out. But in Europe with the common currency, compared to Germany's economy the Euro is weak, meaning their exports are more competitive, and compared to the weaker economies the Euro is strong, which means imports are cheap but exports uncompetitive. This is self-propagating, so Germany has been able to massively increase its trade surplus at the cost of the weaker countries' increasing trade deficits and increasing unemployment, because they are internally devaluing to compensate.
There are two ways to solve this - either do what the US does for its states with a federal taxing and spending Government (meaning fiscal transfers from the stronger economies to the weaker ones to balance this out), or abandoning the Euro and having individual currencies with flexible exchange rates. Business as usual will see Spain, Portugal, Italy and eventually France in the same boat as Greece...
I really dislike this kind of visualization since it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level. besides, the definition of who is actually unemployed varies greatly throughout Europe since governments have been hacking such statuses to make figures look better than they are.
> I really dislike this kind of visualization since it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level.
This visualization is using European NUTS-2 regions, which have roughly equal population. Each region is between 800k and 3 million people. While perfect scaling is not practically possible, it is much better than geographical regions.
Perfect scaling is easy: just represent dots on the maps instead of regions, which is way closer to actual raw data. Of course it requires more work, but that's what people are paid for when they collect data.
It does matter. Consider of a hypothetical country consisting of two equally large regions.
One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there and unemployment rate is 20%.
In the other region there are 1M people and the employment rate is 3%.
Now if you look at the map, it seems that the country is doing pretty poorly. Half of the country has a bad employment rate. Whereas in reality it only affect a small portion of the population.
> One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there
> In the other region there are 1M people
This has already been normalized: these are European NUTS-2 regions, which are drawn to contain roughly equal populations. Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect, but it's not just geographical borders with wildly different populations.
For example, London is split into 5 regions, most big cities are their own region, and small countries are just one region. Going into even smaller regions would be nice (and are defined in the standards as well), but it seems that nobody has put in the effort to collect data at that granularity.
> Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect
It's far from perfect in some countries. The Community of Madrid with 6.5 million people is its own region (or Catalonia with 7.5 million); that's more than Scotland, which is cut up into five NUTS-2 regions. The Paris region (Île-de-France) has 12 million inhabitants, which is more than, say, Austria or Hungary or the Czech Republic, each cut up according to more or less traditional geographic divisions.
You have a point according to how NUTS should work, the grandparent does have a bit of a point according to what it's like in practice.
> which are drawn to contain roughly equal populations
No, the visualization is completely wrong to begin with, because areas with practically population zero like in the northern parts of Scandinavian countries are still comprised of the same regions as their southern neighbors, which makes absolutely no sense and increases their importance area-and-color-wise on the map.
I don't know about the other countries in the map but I can see La Rioja, Spain, which has a bit over 300k people, while Catalonia has more than 7M. So I'm not sure what you're saying really applies.
This is important, but I'd still say it's difficult to reason about population size affected in this chart. Its great for showing regional spread and has value, but like most data one visualisation will always prioritise some information over other info. Comparing nations has always been difficult, so I do like that they at least try to show region's proportionate to population.
I don't understand what you mean. The map in your hypothetical situation nor this blog post wouldn't misrepresent anything.
It doesn't claim to be a map of 'unemployment rate confounded with population density' in the first place. You've imagined that. It's a map of simply the 'unemployment rate'.
For example, the regions of higher unemployment in the south of Belgium make up more than half of the territory, but contain only about a third of the population.
Area FI1D, Northern and Eastern Finland, is the largest NUTS2 region by land area you see on this map. It covers about two thirds of Finland (>200 000 km², about 3 times the size of Republic of Ireland), and has a population of 1.29 million people. Unemployment is ~10 %. Population density is a bit over 5/km²
This area is not very significant in terms of number of people, unemployed or not, but it is very visible on the map (also due to map projection which enlarges northern areas).
(The four NUTS2 regions in continental Finland have roughly the same population, the fifth one Ahvenanmaa/Åland has a population of 30,000 people).
And to add to that the whole republic of Ireland has only 4,761,865 so certainly it seems hard to comprehend how many people are unemployed in the chart.
That's not true, but the problem is likely a different than you anticipated; a large region with very few inhabitants is visually more present than a small region with many inhabitants.
So the number of unemployed people can be much larger in the small region than in the big region, contrary to the visual effect that the big region has on the visualisation (even though the employment rate of both regions could be the same).
But if you are interested in unemployment rates, and not in the number of unemployed people, it does not matter. For example, both Spain and Italy have higher population density in their North regions, but a map that was somewhat normalized with respect to population density would not be clearer to show the fact that unemployment rates are much higher in Sevilla than San Sebastian, or in Lecce than in Milan.
Of course, if you assume that you can derive the number of unemployed people using an average population density (ie. that the size of the regions is proportional to population), the map will not work. But in that case the problem would not be the map but a wrong assumption.
Firstly, the problem is a geographical display that will visually over-weight sparsely populated areas.
Secondly, per your question, it's perfectly natural to expect economic activity to increase with population density. Increased density of people means that travel costs (both time and money) are far lower, and thus the profitability bar for niche goods and services is much lower. That means there's a lot more demand that can be profitably satisfied given the population and their skills, and thus they can be better employed.
In other words, there are reasons cities increase the expectation of employment: they lower transaction costs and increase economies of scale.
Given that here in southern Italy they're usually paid 1/5 of their nominal wage, I'm not surprised. A few companies I've worked with would have folded if they had to pay most of their employees what's written on their salaries. Even while working for bigger european/US companies there's always a tacit expectation that you're gonna work twice the time it's actually written in your contract. And I'm not talking just about low-level positions, I've met junior automotive engineers whose actual wage wouldn't go north of 10€/hr.
Well, by "under the table" I mean that those workers are unknown to the government, so I don't think there is a way to know for sure.
The government's estimates are at ~15%.
From my experience, most workers in agriculture and food & beverages work under the table.
It's a very complicated subject--which I can talk about if you're interested--but I don't know if you can really blame them. Taxes in Italy are almost 50%. For years I've paid 45% in taxes and 1200/yr. for my accountant. In Poland, I only pay 19% for taxes and 40/mo. for my accountant, and services to citizens and public safety are about 1000 times better than Italy. It just feels wrong to pay taxes in Italy: you don't have any money left, and whenever you need something from the government it's a nightmare and done so badly that you feel you're in a third-world country.
Yep, I have many friends who are officially unemployed; all are working. Quite hard as well. The system in Spain does not encourage paying taxes, starting companies or hiring people legally. It is quite bad but I do not see it fixed soon.
In case anyone is wondering what unemployed means in this context:
> An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as someone aged 15 to 74 without work during the reference week who is available to start work within the next two weeks and who has actively sought employment at some time during the last four weeks. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a percentage of the labour force.
I wonder how many plausible alternative captions we can come up with for this map? A few takes:
* Corruption level (blue is less)
* Income per capita (blue is more)
* Education level (blue is better)
* Price of a beer (blue is more)
* etc
What's the insight? Historically those areas in the southern Mediterranean have been harder to defend / had more diversity / immigration / general variables. Is this what you're referring to?
I'm not sure how much a simple median would tell you. My instinct is that how much the climate varies over the year might be as or more important than the point average.
"Regarding Europe’s other large countries, the proportions were 47.1% for Britain, 31.9% in Germany (which retains a strong tradition of technical education), 43.6% in France, 40.1% in Spain and 39.1% in Poland."
As you already imply with Germany: One big problem I have with educational statistics is that they are usually completely ignoring the value of dual education systems.
That's not the reason for it. Rather, there's a very high premium put on having third-level education in Ireland as it was historically one of the ways to get out of poverty, even if that meant emigrating elsewhere. We could do with more people actually doing vocational courses on the German model, but owing to shifts in our economy, that's not as popular as it once was.
Also, education in Ireland isn't quite free. Sure, it's inexpensive compared to, say, the US, but the important thing is that access to third-level institutions is radically egalitarian, practically to a fault, owing to how entrance into third-level education works, based on a points score from your top six subjects in your final second-level exams.
Big part of Europe is missing (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kavkaz...). But for some reason it includes asian part of Turkey, islands, part of south america... ;-)
The South America / islands and included because they are territories belonging to a EU country (France, Spain, Portugal). Turkey is in there because it's a candidate country.
It's still a candidate. It's moving backwards rather than forwards on its acceptance criteria, and realistically won't be joining anytime soon, but it's still a candidate.
It's not really a question anymore for the next few years (or decades). Official status is just a political tool by now and even then this classification may lag behind.
Low numbers go towards red, high numbers towards blue. Often, red implies something bad so that's a bit confusion. I guess it's the standard scheme for low/high numbers at eurostat.
I know; but the chart's source data almost certainly doesn't use figures that are calculated in the same way either. At best, they'll have been manually corrected for estimated biases. (Will they have correctly accounted for how many people get shifted off into disability payments and other health-related benefits that are used to massage unemployment figures? I have my doubts.)
My point was more that a suspiciously precise number of 5.8% was chosen as a magical barometer of goodness, justifying a switch in hue, not just brightness or saturation. The magic number of 5.8% doesn't seem to have support elsewhere.
Can people really still point at Turkey and call it a serious candidate for EU membership?
There is a serious case for including Israeli figures in this kind of pan-regional not-exclusively-EU analysis. Israel is far closer, culturally, to Europe than geographically closer neighbors (e.g. Morocco, Tunisia) and is increasingly part of European academic, sporting, and artistic interests (most recently thinking of Eurocrypt 2018, which was in Tel Aviv this week, and this year's Giro D'Italia, which is starting in Israel this weekend).
There are strong historical reasons why Israel will never apply to be a member of the EU or to adopt the Euro - but a perspective is to think of Israel as strongly Eurosceptic. Can anyone really look at Eurosceptic parties on the Continent and say that, what, the EU defines what it means to be European? That Hungary is no longer culturally European or that it dropped off the Continent because Viktor Orbán got elected Prime Minister?
As things stand, currently, Turkey's candidacy isn't going to be going forward anytime soon. But that's not the point. It is an official candidate, so Eurostat keeps an eye on it. If Israel became a candidate, Eurostat would do ditto (though for practical reasons Israel also won't be a candidate anytime soon).
Incidentally, Turkey is also in a customs union with the EU, the only non-EU/EEA/EFTA country of any significant size to be in one. This gives Eurostat added incentive to keep an eye on it.
Israel is a member of or involved in various non-EU pan-European things (EBU, Council of Europe etc), but Eurostat is an EU thing, not a European thing.
