Numbers on Incapacity Benefit in the UK grew substantially with the arrival of New Labour in power, mostly, I suspect, as a result of the back-to-work policy that put pressure on the unemployed. The majority of people on IB are in former industrial areas where jobs are harder to come by than in S-E England. I suspect a number of long-term unemployed got themselves signed on sick so as to go on receiving benefit while not being pressured to get a job. The government is officially "working" on this now.
My feeling after spending some time looking into employment stats is that (despite ILO standards) there are so many special cases and national quirks that comparisons are hard to establish. The annoying thing is that this doesn't prevent politicians and the media from using more or less massaged numbers for propaganda purposes -- the unemployment figure being next in CW godhead to annual GDP growth... When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
It's in the nitty gritty details (such as definitions) and the context that I find labor statitistics interesting. One of the reasons I like approaches such as the pyramid is that they make it harder to hide the national quirks. With the raw census data one could imagine building a pyramid for France & for the UK, which would have even more detail then the one in my diary. You could distinguish fulltime & part-time work (maybe even include information on voluntary part-time) and include more detail on the types of other not in the labor force groups such as the disabled. If done using the right graph size, or it's corresponding table, it would reveal the large UK disability group.
I'll comment more if I have more chance.
