The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe
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1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2519/umfrage/... 2: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/762452/umfrag...
So the concerning area's show as blue and the ok area's show as panic inducing Orange instinctively. Most odd.
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.
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-credit-...
> 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.
5s Google - http://www.4ni.co.uk/northern-ireland-news/243195/other-news..., some guy claiming whilst working.
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).
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.
He lived at Ballysillan Crescent, Belfast, which is a B14 post code. Local housing allowance rates are https://www.nihe.gov.uk/index/benefits/lha/current_lha_rates...
Here's that street on Google maps: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@54.6291805,-5.9663763,3a,75y,...
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Read the Debbie Abrahams comments here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm13... )
There are literally thousands of these.
So, while it's possible to defraud benefits it's not easy, and it's not common. It's certainly much tighter than it used to be in the 90s.
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... )
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.
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.
[1] davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/origins-of-unemployment.pdf
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.
However, the 25-54 unemployment rate (the opposite of the "employment rate") is not calculated by state or locality in the US.
* 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...
Would want to be employed on what kind of job? At what pay?
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.
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.
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.
Is that apples to apples?
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.
Here is a thing in English that seems to come for free if you give them bogus personal data: https://www.agenda-austria.at/en/publication/austria-the-lan...
A longer German blurb about this study is here: https://www.agenda-austria.at/oesterreich-das-land-der-verst...
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.
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".
Also, unemployment benefits end after 6 months no matter what.
What happens after six months if you don't have family willing to support you? You're on the streets?
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.
You accept a job, do it for a couple of days, and that's it.
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.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmar...
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.
Not having any employability in Spain or Italy is going to be a tough problem.
Sure, long term, that might lead to even bigger problems, but on the other hand, long-term is not NOW.
But since its conception I only read good things about it.
Why do "apprentices" deserve less than is considered the minimum living wage.
Even minimum wage has been corrupted.
UBI, or something equally revolutionary, I think will be needed without a major population collapse.
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.
Not uneconomic, but it would impact then in a way that might require reducing profits or flattening wage profiles.
That's not contrary to good management it's contrary to greed.
This was the fear people had.
Somehow most people who were paid less that minimum wage delivered enough value.
Only a few companies needed to stop their service.
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.
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.
IANAStatistician, just pointing out that "hey look 5% unemployment" can be a very misleading statistic to use for laypersons.
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.
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.
It's hard to see what more they could do.
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.
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...
It shows unemployment RATES, so population density does not matter.
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.
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).
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.
A map is not a histogram.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
Many, many people work under the table, very often pretending that they're still out of work to keep getting the unemployment check.
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.
Also, what is so different about Macedonia compared to the surrounding regions that it has such lower unemployment rates?
https://www.oecd.org/employment/harmonised-unemployment-rate...
https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate-hur...
> 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.
Religion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_...
Unemployment: http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and...
"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."
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013041...
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.
- one picture
- a whole lot of non-sequitur.
5.8% is a the cut-off for a healthy labour market, apparently.
Meanwhile https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-s-unemployment... describes London's unemployment rate reaching 5.8% as a record low!
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.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-unemployment-in-israel-fa...
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?
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.