European Tribune - Community, Politics & Progress.

Employment, unemployment and Inactivity***

by Laurent GUERBY
Thu Jun 29th, 2006 at 03:51:38 AM EST

Thanks to Antoine Belgodere, an interesting report from Eurostat on inactivity rates (PDF) where population=employed+unemployed+inactive.

***From the front page. Many fascinating graphs provided in the comments section below.

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Employment, unemployment and Inactivity*** | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Very interesting! Thanks, Laurent!

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

by Melanchthon on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 11:44:48 AM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 1)

I believe I'm going to hijack the wikipedia articles for unemployment to talk about the three composants of the population (employed,unemployed,inactive) instead of just two.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 12:24:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

It's not called hijacking, it's called improving. It's a wiki after all.

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 12:36:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:20:36 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

OECD figures, both sexes:
unemployment participation employed/population FR 21.3 37.5 29.5 UK 10.9 67.4 60.1

Impressive differences.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:26:01 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:20:55 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Look at the strength of traditional gender roles in Malta!

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:33:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Yep, that's what the report notes too :)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:03:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Data:

From the graph (0.5 accuracy per pixel reading) inactivity illness explanation FR male 6.5 female 20.0 total 26.5 male 1.5 female 1.5 UK male 9.0 female 23.0 total 32.0 male 5.0 female 5.0

From OECD 2004 on the 25-54 (see here) unemployment participation employment/population FR male 7.4 93.6 86.7 female 9.8 79.8 72.0 both 8.5 86.6 79.2 UK male 3.8 91.0 87.5 female 3.4 76.8 74.2 both 3.6 83.8 80.7

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:50:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

So UK has 2.3 time less official unemployment on this age group (3.6% vs 8.5%). All of this with only 1.5% more employed people. This is to say about all of the difference in unemployment comes from the UK government convincing people they're inactive and not unemployed (in various ways) whereas the FR government wasn't as successful at this game. 1-0 for Blair. See the "willing to work" figure below for the so-called "inactive".

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:01:22 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Since part time employment is 13.4% of employment in FR vs 24.1% in UK, this makes the 1.5% difference in employment even less impressive as a 10 point difference is about 7 points of the whole population (if we assume 25-54 has more or less the same part time share as 15-64).

by Laurent GUERBY on Mon Jun 26th, 2006 at 07:28:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:21:14 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:21:31 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

I'd call this graph the measure of the efficiency of the psychological warfare of the official unemployment agencies: how much they discourage job seekers to show up . Lithuania (LV), Bulgaria (BG) and Estonia (EE) are the top "tough" guyes. Then come Austria, Italy and UK.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:11:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:22:01 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Here FR does a much better job than UK at convincing people to be inactive rather than unemployed. Probably all the "pre-retirement" stuff, excluding retirement, UK wins.

From OECD, 55-64 both sexes:
unemployment participation employment/population FR 6.3 39.6 37.1 UK 3.1 58.0 56.2

But still FR is not winning on the official unemployment measure.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:19:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

This is great: I've been meaning to write about this stuff for ages...

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 04:29:56 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

From the OECD: part time employment is 13.4% of employment in FR (80.6% of part time employed population is women) vs 24.1% in the UK (77.8% women).

So lots of part-time jobs on the UK side.

Average annual hours worked when in employment FR: 1441 UK: 1669 (15.8% more hours).

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:30:18 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

UK business leaders think the 48h/wk limit in the European regulations is too restrictive, and the UK got an exemption. It is allowed, and I don't know how common it is, to make it a condition of employment that the employee will waive their right to work no more than 48h a week.

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:33:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Population are pretty close UK vs FR. Eurostat database doesn't have UK population for 2004 so I used 2003 for UK. Population 15-64 is around UK: 39.1e6 FR: 39.3e6, 15-24/15-64 is UK: 19.4% FR:20.0%, 25-54/15-64 is UK: 63.4% FR: 63.8%, 55-64/15-64 is UK:17.2% FR:16.2%.

So a tad younger in France.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 05:48:29 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

To express everything as percent of population:

employed/population = given

unemployed/population = participation_rate - employed/population

inactive/population = 1 - participation_rate

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 06:01:52 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

OECD report with 2005 data (PDF).

On 25-54 male+female:

unemployment participation employment/population 2004 2005 FR 8.8 8.7 87.0 87.2 79.3 79.6 UK 3.6 3.5 83.8 84.1 80.7 81.1

A bit better on the UK side, unless it's just favourable rounding :), but no big change in the global picture.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 25th, 2006 at 06:20:32 PM EST

Re: Employment, unemployment and Inactivity (none / 0)

Great diary, Laurent. Bit by bit we must move towards a more accurate and useful way of talking about employment-unemployment than the usual "unemployment statistics" propaganda.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jun 26th, 2006 at 08:09:28 AM EST

Employment, unemployment and Inactivity*** | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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