14/9/15: Europe's Gen Jinx: At Home and Stagnating

One fascinating map:

Source: qz.com

And here is the same data set for 2013:

Source: qz.com

Plotting percentage of people aged 25-34 living with their parents across the continent (plus the U.S.), the map tells a very interesting story. Consider the following issues relating to these numbers. Higher % of prime working age adults living with their parents 

• Implies lower mobility of prime working age cohort across jobs and career opportunities (poorer labour market matching);
• Lower exposures to key skills, such as cultural diversity and languages, etc for this cohort;
• Is likely associated, in part, with longer duration in education (good thing) and higher life-time cost of such education compared to labour markets returns on education (bad thing);
• Is reflective of lower employment rates and higher unemployment rates of this cohort across a number of European countries;
• Implies lower propensity toward family formation (a demographic time bomb of sorts);
• Suggests greater dependency costs for older generations of parents who (within ages of over 45) are simultaneously facing pressures to save for their own retirement;
• Implies lower investment and tax bases in the economies where this trend is more pronounced; 
• Likely correlates with higher cost (relative to income) of renting quality accommodation - a signal of reduced capacity of these economies to attract high quality human capital from abroad, thus reducing social and economic mobility not only for the country natives, but also across Europe as a whole, and so on…

All of which makes this map extremely significant in terms of identifying future potential for long-term economic development and growth in a number of European countries. And, frankly speaking, for any country with said percentage in excess of 20%, these prospects are not too great… 

Welcome to Europe's Generation Jinx...

5/8/15: Irish monthly Unemployment Rate remains stuck at 9.7%

CSO data on estimated unemployment (that used to be released with Live Register) shows estimated unemployment steady at 9.7% in July, for the third month in a row.

• Officially, there were 208,900 unemployed 15-74 year olds in Ireland in July 2015, up 300 on June 2015. 3mo average through July is at 208,833 against 3mo average through April 2015 at 211,833, an improvement of 3,000 on 3mo average basis. Compared to July 2011, there were 107,500 fewer officially unemployed in Ireland. Compared to July 2014, number of unemployed in Ireland fell 32,400.
• However, factoring in those participating in State-established Activation Programmes, number of unemployed in Ireland stood at 289,788 (estimated using lagged data for Activation Programmes participation) in July, down 77,658 on July 2011 and down 16,128 on July 2014.
• There were 37,600 younger unemployed in Ireland in July 2015 (15-24 year olds), up 700 on June 2015 and down 8,200 on July 2014. The number of younger unemployed declined 28,500 compared to July 2011. 3mo average number of younger unemployed through July 2015 was 37,233 against 40,300 average for the 3 months through April 2015. 

• Estimated unemployment rate for 15-74 year olds stood at 9.7% in July, unchanged on May and June, down on 9.8% in March and April. Unemployment rate is down 5 percentage points on July 2011 and 1.5 percentage points on July 2014. Last 4 months marked the slowest sequence of declines in unemployment rate since March 2014.
• Estimated unemployment rate for younger workers was 20.2% in July 2015 compared to 19.9% in June 2015. The unemployment rate declined 8.4 percentage points compared to July 2011 and was down 3.4 percentage points on July 2014.

The key point is the slowdown in the unemployment rate reductions. Over 2012, average monthly rate of reduction in unemployment was 0.083%,  this rose to 0.153% average over 2013 and 0.167% over 2014. So far, over 7 months of 2015 the average monthly rate of unemployment rate decline was 0.071%.

16/7/2014: What Exactly does JobBridge Public Sector Record Tells Us?

We are all familiar with the JobBridge scheme run by the Irish State:

• Young people are 'incentivised' into 'apprenticeships' where they are paid social benefits plus EUR50/week by the State to work on 'enhancing their skills'. 
• In many cases (majority?) there are no real skills training components to the scheme and instead people are used as cheap labour.
• In theory, upon completion of the scheme they are prioritised into hiring, since (in theory again) they have acquired new skills (of importance to their employer) and have established a proven track record of work.

So there can be two reasons why a JobBridge participation may result in not employing the intern:

1. Intern proves herself/himself to be unsuited for the job (bad skills or bad aptitude etc); or
2. JobBridge internship was set up not to lead to employment (in other words, from the start it was used as a vehicle for obtaining cheap temporary help).

Now, take this fact: 

"The Department of Social Protection has confirmed that 261 interns have worked at departments since the back-to-work scheme began, of whom 233 finished their internships. None were offered permanent jobs because there is a moratorium on recruitment in the public sector, which only allows staff to be hired in exceptional circumstances." 

So, let's ask: 

• Was the reason that all 233 interns were not good enough for the job (remember, the article cites some instances where hiring was done, for the positions interns held, but not of interns themselves)? How can this be true if we have 'the best educated workforce in the world'? And if JobBridge is a 'competitive hiring scheme' where there is pre-screening of the candidates for suitability going on? or
• May be JobBridge was set up - in the case of these 233 internships - to extract cheap labour? Surely the Government would not do such a dubious (ethically) thing as deceive young unemployed into a promise of a reasonable chance of gaining a job at the end, while knowing that "there is a moratorium on recruitment in the public sector, which only allows staff to be hired in exceptional circumstances"? Surely not!

So which one is true, then (because there is no other, 'third' truth possible)? Our education system produces bad crops of candidates unsuited for employment in our excellence-focused public sector? Or our State Training Programmes are run with ex ante expectation of not hiring people completing them?