Chart of the Day: US – European Gap in Employment Ratio Virtually Gone
What accounts for this chart?:
The employment-to-population ratio—the share of adults that are employed—has historically been much higher in the United States than in Europe. However, the gap narrowed dramatically in the last decade and had almost disappeared by the end of 2009. In this post, we show that the narrowing employment gap is due to three factors: declining U.S. employment rates across almost all age-gender groups; more women working in Europe, particularly prime-age and older workers; and rising employment for older European men. We link most of these shifts to the influence of underlying trends (many reflecting changes in European social policies) and to differences in labor market performance during the Great Recession.
Draw your conclusions about what this says about the different American and European economic models.
Much more at the link below.
interesting. wow. scary.
whats going on here? i thought jobs were/are being eaten by chinese/indians.
In Europe the trend has been for getting more and more people into work. It has lead to fewer stay at home parents. In that respect they have been catching up with the US. Now with the recession both areas are finding it is harder to employ everyone.
If income instead of debt had been increased, and productivity had been shared between corporations and employees, then unemployment wouldn’t be such a big deal.
But what a single person (ie. husband) had to earn to achieve an standard of living now has to be earned by two (not that I don’t want women to work, but that’s not the point) and half of the income goes to pay debts. If this wasn’t the case people could work less, enjoy a decent standard of living, consume less (!), etc.
This gets idiotic “some” times, you only need to add stupid cultural traits into the mix and voila.
I agree. I think that families with only one earner should be encouraged. Constantly increasing GDP is unsustainable in the long term. Also debts should be monitored by regulators. If debts had not been allowed to get so big we would have avoided all the problems of the credit crunch. House prices would have been far more stable and the banks would not need bailouts. There needs to be a new utility emphasis on banks, and any banks that fail should have entire boards imprisoned. Start with big banks and over the next ten years let it trickle down to all banks. Then bank bailouts will be a thing of the past. Also end the lender of last resort status of central banks. There are many little things that would mean that banking could again be boring and safe.