The review of his book gave credit to an academic - often unsung heroes who give a lot of free help and advice to journalists and others (I'm an ex-academic):
"I followed up the reference given, and was kindly supplied with recent figures by the source quoted in the book, Monica Threlfall of Loughborough University [ m.threlfall at lboro.ac.uk ].
Youth unemployment 2002
Participation in labour market: UK 62.5%, France 36.9%
Unemployed ratio/population: UK 6.8%, France 7.0%
Unemployed rate/labour force: UK 10.9%, France 18.9%
As Briscoe says, having so many young people in employment is arguably a policy success for France, and a success the UK government is anxious to emulate, with a target of getting 50% (up from the current 40%) of young people into third level education by 2009."
http://plus.maths.org/issue35/reviews/book2/index.html
I also wrote to the BBC, the Guardian and to The Independent's correspondent in France, John Lichfield, about the uncritical use of the 22% figure. No response from the latter. But Ashley Seager, Guardian Economics Editor replied saying:
"I had in fact looked into the issue of French in further education and was informed by several experts that the ILO figures I was quoting adjust for those kinds of things. I also think that if French youth unemployment were genuinely as low as the Briscoe piece claims, the French government would have jumped on those figures long ago. "
I put the latter point to Briscoe, who commented:
"I suspect they either "blindly" took the standard data off the ILO or other website and looked no further or perhaps they needed to portray their situation as a crisis in order to hope to get through an unpopular policy?" Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
I just checked the definition: it doesn't correct at all.
And I hadn't realised that the stats on http://laborsta.ilo.org/ are freely available. Look at that ....
Ashley Seager's justification is extraordinary for an Economics Correspondent. He admits to using (and emphasizing, because he's done as much if not more of it as other journalists) the one-in-four number on hearsay ("several experts..."), and on absence of counter-spin from a government that, in the circumstances, was spinning frantically the same way as he was...
It just doesn't make any sense ILO figures allow for international comparisons but you need to include the labor force participation rate into the comparison so you know what percentage of the total population is used for the unemployment and employment statistics. In the case of adults in labor markets that are mostly based on the formal sector the labor force participation rate (that is the number of people who are looking for work or currently employed) is usually pretty high but in the case of youth or in countries with large informal sectors or subsistence farming sectors it's key to doing any analysis of unemployment/employment data.
More seriously, if this is the standard of knowledge possessed by a senior economic journalist on one of the serious papers I absolutely despair. It took me a few moments to check the definitions on the ILO site. I'm not a domain expert, but I can read.
However, I'll admit that I may be biased since I work on unemployment issues and that economic correspondents have plenty of other economic related items to keep in their heads. Nevertheless, as you point out, the ILO does give fairly clear definitions of how it's measures are calculated.
I've complained about Ashley Seager in the past, and again on the article you link to, Alexandra. The whole thing is appalling. Yet Seager's response to Ted Welch (see above) shows he does not care.
