Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Economics: 24/06/2009: OECD Unemployment stats

OECD's latest unemployment forecast is out for the Euroarea. Two things worth noting:

First, the OECD has gotten Irish unemployment spectacularly wrong (they used QNHS official data that is lagging). Correcting for this, chart below shows the discrepancy delivering up to date numbers. Scary.
Second, even the original chart numbers show Ireland as having the most extreme rise in the Euro area in unemployment. In sheer numbers, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Sweden all had smaller increases in unemployment than Ireland. Taking into account Live Reg latest numbers, Ireland's 230,000 newly-added unemployed (since December 2007) mean that our unemployment increase was greater than that for Australia and Denmark combined, or Denmark and Italy combined, or Denmark and Sweden combined...

Globally: unemployment in OECD countries is now expected to continue to rise well into 2010, per yesterday’s data from the OECD. The average unemployment rate will be approaching 10%, up from 7.8% in April, according to new projections.

“More than 57 million people will be unemployed in OECD countries by the end of 2010, according to OECD estimates, up from 37.2 million at the end of 2008, when the average unemployment rate was 6.8%. The expected increase will bring OECD-wide unemployment to 9.9% at the end of 2010, its highest level since the 1970s, with an average for the year of 9.8%. Unemployment touched a recent low point of 5.5% in the last quarter of 2007, standing at 31.6 million at the end of that year,” says OECD.

Previous downturns show that the jobs recovery will lag a long way behind the pickup in economic growth.

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