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The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

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Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#32
post #5

I'd like to add that actual figures for Italy are hard to estimate correctly. Many, many people work under the table, very often pretending that they're still out of work to keep getting the unemployment check.

Same in Spain. People are obviously working. Otherwise there would be riots in the streets already, haha.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#33
post #4

I really dislike this kind of visualization since it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level. besides, the definition of who is actually unemployed varies greatly throughout Europe since governments have been hacking such statuses to make figures look better than they are.

> I really dislike this kind of visualization since it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level.

This visualization is using European NUTS-2 regions, which have roughly equal population. Each region is between 800k and 3 million people. While perfect scaling is not practically possible, it is much better than geographical regions.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#34
post #14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, as the regions with different population sizes should have different overall importance.

No, why should a person living in place A have a different expectance of employment than a person in place B?

Firstly, the problem is a geographical display that will visually over-weight sparsely populated areas.

Secondly, per your question, it's perfectly natural to expect economic activity to increase with population density. Increased density of people means that travel costs (both time and money) are far lower, and thus the profitability bar for niche goods and services is much lower. That means there's a lot more demand that can be profitably satisfied given the population and their skills, and thus they can be better employed.

In other words, there are reasons cities increase the expectation of employment: they lower transaction costs and increase economies of scale.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#35
post #2

Meh blog post. Here's the interactive chart at Eurostat: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmar...

The definition of "unemployment" is important here. it An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as: > someone aged 15 to 74 (in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway: 16 to 74 years); > without work during the reference week; > available to start work within the next two weeks (or has already found a job to start within the next thr…

No - to be on the dole you need to be actively searching for a job in most jurisdictions in Europe. E.g. in the UK you need to go down to the job center every week and prove you're searching for a job in order to claim unemployment benefit. It's literally called jobseeker's allowance to reflect that.

Also what is a "government job market program"? Are you referring to a government employing people en masse to inflate the employment rate? You generally need taxes to do that so it's probably a legitimate approach.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#36
Two days ago I was watching a German TV show in which the panelists discussed the low-wage-job boom: apparently unemployment is very low (5.6%) but an unhealthy portion of the jobs people are working are low-wage and/or exploitative of labor, and thus not really contributing to long-term social stability.

If too many people are working minimum wage and the minimum wage isn't realistic then sooner or later you have a big problem paying for social services.

(In Germany it's 8.84 EUR per hour but has only existed for a few years and I gather there's a lot of noncompliance.)

So, interesting map, but only telling part of the story.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#37
post #19

> where the unemployment rate is below 5.8%, a level generally considered to indicate a healthy labor market 5.8% is a the cut-off for a healthy labour market, apparently. Meanwhile https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-s-unemployment... describes London's unemployment rate reaching 5.8% as a record low!

The two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and in any case you’re probably not comparing figures that are calculated in the same way.

I know; but the chart's source data almost certainly doesn't use figures that are calculated in the same way either. At best, they'll have been manually corrected for estimated biases. (Will they have correctly accounted for how many people get shifted off into disability payments and other health-related benefits that are used to massage unemployment figures? I have my doubts.)

My point was more that a suspiciously precise number of 5.8% was chosen as a magical barometer of goodness, justifying a switch in hue, not just brightness or saturation. The magic number of 5.8% doesn't seem to have support elsewhere.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter. Consider of a hypothetical country consisting of two equally large regions. One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there and unemployment rate is 20%. In the other region there are 1M people and the employment rate is 3%. Now if you look at the map, it seems that the country is doing pretty poorly. Half of the country has a bad employment rate. Whereas in reality it only affect a small portion…

Does that apply to the european regions listed here? How significant are the differences in population density that they make a tangible difference?

For example, the regions of higher unemployment in the south of Belgium make up more than half of the territory, but contain only about a third of the population.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#39
post #8

I wonder how many plausible alternative captions we can come up with for this map? A few takes: * Corruption level (blue is less) * Income per capita (blue is more) * Education level (blue is better) * Price of a beer (blue is more) * etc

Education?. Really?. "Regarding Europe’s other large countries, the proportions were 47.1% for Britain, 31.9% in Germany (which retains a strong tradition of technical education), 43.6% in France, 40.1% in Spain and 39.1% in Poland." http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013041...

From that article Ireland is the most highly educated country in Europe, I never would have guessed that.

Re: The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

#40

Big part of Europe is missing (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kavkaz...). But for some reason it includes asian part of Turkey, islands, part of south america... ;-)

The South America / islands and included because they are territories belonging to a EU country (France, Spain, Portugal). Turkey is in there because it's a candidate country.
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