Damned Lies
I heard yet another conservative pundit on the radio this morning dissing “Old Europe” and its high unemployment rate compared with the US. This is the usual line taken by people who have invented a way of measuring unemployment that manages to ignore millions of people, denying them social welfare benefits and representation. European unemployment figures, by comparison, use less massaged figures…
In December 2003, the adjusted unemployment rate was 9.9 percent, compared with 5.7 percent for the unemployment rate. In other words, on top of the 5.7 percent of the labor force who said they didn’t have a job, a low figure by recent historical standards, 4.2 percent of the labor force was either marginally attached or wanted to work full-time but couldn’t.
So it appears that the “official” US unemployment figures manage to understate their total by nearly 50%, conveniently halving their stated unemployment rate when compared with those pesky Europeans.
The standardised unemployment rate for the OECD area(1) fell to 6.9% in December 2003 … In the Euro area, the standardised unemployment rate remained at 8.8% in December 2003, 0.2 percentage point higher than a year earlier. For the United States, the standardised unemployment rate was 5.7% in December 2003 … Over the twelve months to December 2003, the standardised unemployment rate rose in France from 9.1% to 9.5% and in Germany from 9.0% to 9.2%. In Canada, the standardised unemployment rate was 7.4% in December 2003, 0.1 percentage point lower than a year earlier. In October 2003, the standardised unemployment rate in Italy was 8.4%, 0.5 percentage point lower than a year earlier and the standardised unemployment rate in the United Kingdom was 4.9%, 0.2 percentage point lower than a year earlier.