Unemployment Rates in Countries Around the World | Global Finance

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010 (est.)

o Red – highest unemployment rate
o Light pink – lowest unemployment rate
o White – no data available

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NOTES:

1. Includes data from the International Labour Organization, April 2010; the International Monetary Fund (IMF); Eurostat; the World Bank; and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

2. The criteria are not necessarily the same for every country. For example, the lower limit in the age bracket under consideration range from 10 years old in Brazil to 16 years old in many other countries; the upper limit ranges from 61 upward.

3. Rates for 2010 are the most recent from the ILO.

4. Rates are not seasonally adjusted; the seasonally adjusted rate for the U.S. as of May 2010 was 9.9%, according to the BLS.

Unemployment is an economic condition in which individuals actively seeking jobs remain un-hired. While this would seem to be straightforward, there are several complications in both measuring unemployment within a country and in comparing unemployment rates from country to country:

• Definitions of “employed person” and “unemployed person” can make this concept complicated and can contribute to what some economists call “hidden unemployment”. For example:

o A person who loses well-paid, full-time work, cannot find similar work and settles for a job at one-tenth of the pay doing part-time work is classified as “employed.”
o A person who loses a job, actively seeks work for a year and then takes a couple of weeks off from his or her job search (called “a discouraged worker”) not only may no be longer considered unemployed but might not even be counted in the labor force.

Therefore, many economists assert that, if the “hidden unemployed” or the “underemployed” (which are difficult to measure) are taken into account, the actual unemployment rate may be much higher than official statistics suggest.

• Economic reports from individual countries or compiled by different organizations may involve different measures of unemployment. Examples of the various measures are:

o A census-type measure of the full labor force, which some critics say may lead to distortions.
o Employment office records, which count those unemployed who are registered in the employment office.
o Surveys of a sample of the labor force; proponents consider this the most comprehensive, as the surveys can be designed to cover virtually the entire population, all branches of economic activity, all sectors of the economy and all categories of workers, including, for example, own-account workers and unpaid family workers.

• The “normal” or “acceptable” rate of unemployment within one country can be different from that in another country, or between countries at different points in an economic cycle.

This is why, to get a truer picture, most economists prefer to look at a variety of statistics, including, for example, labor market participation rate, the percentage of people aged 15 to 64 who are currently employed or searching for employment, the total number of full-time jobs in an economy, and the total number of person-hours worked in a month compared to the total number of person-hours people would like to work.

Nevertheless, unemployment rates remain a useful measure of the health of a particular economy over time.

The unemployment rate has both social and economic implications. Among them are:

• Rising unemployment results in loss of income for individuals, reduced collection of taxes for governments, and increased pressure on government spending on social benefits.
• Beyond its financial and social effects on personal life – long-term unemployment negatively affects social cohesion and hinders economic growth, of particular concern to policymakers.
The effects of high (and particularly prolonged) unemployment go beyond the borders of a particular nation and can have a major impact on the economies of its trading partners of that nation as well, because reduced employment in one country leads to a decrease in demand for exports from its trading partners.
• The global economic crisis increased world unemployment from 178 million on the eve of the global crisis in 2007 (after four consecutive years of decreases) to 212 million in late 2009, according to International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates. Based on IMF economic forecasts, the ILO estimates that global unemployment is likely to remain high through 2010. In the developed economies and the European Union, unemployment is projected to increase in 2010, while it will stabilize at present levels, or decline only slightly, in other regions. Although in early 2010 global labor markets showed some signs of stabilization, including some slowing of job losses, the global recession has had a devastating effect on employment that will not be reversed anytime soon.

OECD: Young people and the jobs crisis in numbers

The Euro area was particularly hard hit in the recent crisis, although there were countries in the Euro area and in Europe in general that weathered the crisis better – for example, Germany and Sweden. By April 2010 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that month on month the general picture was of broad stability across OECD countries. Nevertheless, the picture for certain individual countries is not all that encouraging. Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the 16-nation Eurozone and the second highest unemployment rate in the European Union, surpassed only by Latvia. Indeed, Spain’s unemployment rate was still rising through the first quarter of 2010, with the figure hitting 20.05%, or 4.61 million individuals, an increase of 286,200 from the fourth quarter of 2009 (and a rise from an 8.25% unemployment rate in 2007). French investment bank Natixis estimated that prior to the current economic recession 30% of Spain’s labor force worked directly or indirectly for the construction industry, making it particularly vulnerable to the global credit crunch because growth relied on a property boom that was fueled by easy access to loans but which has now collapsed.

Historically, women have been more affected by unemployment than men. However, that gap narrowed in the early part of the century and then stabilized. But in the recent global economic downturn the unemployment rate for men became higher than that for women in many parts of the world, partly due to the hard hit on the construction industry around the world. In addition, while unemployment among young people (most often defined as 15-to-24 year olds) is traditionally around double that for adults (since many young people are in school or newly graduated), in the recent recession that figure has increased to nearly three times the unemployment rate of adults, up to four times in some countries, and is set to keep rising into 2011, particularly in OECD countries. Some policymakers talk of a “lost generation” if this group is not targeted for jobs programs.

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