
The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe - Four_Star
http://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-the-unemployment-rate-in-every-region-of-europe/
======
Luc
Meh blog post. Here's the interactive chart at Eurostat:
[http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmar...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmarket&lang=en)

~~~
draugadrotten
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 three months); > actively having sought employment at some
> time during the last four weeks. > The unemployment rate is the number of
> people unemployed as a percentage of the labour force.
> [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
> explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
> explained/index.php/Glossary:Unemployment)

This means that any person which is currently not earning their keep, but not
actively searching a job (because they are on the dole) will not be unemployed
in these statistics. It also means that any person which is not earning their
keep, but unable to take a job in the next two weeks because the are in a
government job market program, will not be listed as unemployed in these
statistics.

 _Lies, damn lies and statistics._

~~~
toomanybeersies
That's the standard definition for unemployment. An unemployed person is
generally considered to be someone who would want to be employed, but is not.
It is meant to be a measurement of the number of people who want jobs, but are
unable to get them.

There are other measurements for labour force participation, which are usually
fairly easy to find, and are a proportion of people who are legally able to
work, against the number of actual workers.

~~~
roenxi
It is as good a time as any to wish a pox on all jargon and reflect that a
person with no employment is unlikely to be unemployed.

If anyone else is interested, a very light search into the history of when
they picked that measure as the standard suggests it has been with us since
~1930. Apparently the nature of complaints hasn't changed much over the years.

[1] davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/origins-of-unemployment.pdf

~~~
zimzam
The jargon exists because the category is useful in answering the question
"how is the economy doing".

If we included people who are retired then we would see unemployment go up and
down in correlation with generation sizes: when the baby boomers retire the
number of "unemployed" people would go up dramatically. But that confuses the
picture of whether businesses are hiring.

~~~
esbranson
Hence why the question should be and is limited to ages 25-54 year olds. A
"retired" 25 year old should be included in the definition of unemployment.

However, the 25-54 unemployment rate (the opposite of the "employment rate")
is not calculated by state or locality in the US.

------
biztos
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.

~~~
k__
I'm more of an UBI guy. The whole minimum-wage stuff didn't seem like a good
idea to me.

But since its conception I only read good things about it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
To me minimum wage is great - but why (in UK) does a 24 year old need less
than a 25 year old, or indeed deserve less?

Why do "apprentices" deserve less than is considered the minimum living wage.

Even minimum wage has been corrupted.

UBI, or something equally revolutionary, I think will be needed without a
major population collapse.

~~~
jdietrich
One of the main risks of a minimum wage is suppressing the employment rate of
less-skilled, less-experienced workers. If the minimum wage is too high, it's
uneconomic to take on staff who don't deliver enough value for the business.
The reduced rates for young people and apprentices exist to reduce this
stifling effect - without them, you'd make it uneconomic for businesses to
take a chance on new employees who might need a lot of training or support.

This does of course create a secondary risk of businesses laying off older
staff in favour of young people and "apprentices", but I haven't seen any
clear evidence that this is a widespread problem.

~~~
krageon
If you've never seen any evidence of that, you've not looked very hard: This
is what every supermarket does for their filler jobs, and to a lesser extent
for their till and other store facing jobs as well. If you're over 18, you
have to be very lucky to keep your job (or more realistically, to keep being
given work) in such a situation.

Outside of supermarkets this sort of practice is also pretty entrenched in a
lot of small-medium IT businesses: They have a sizeable portion of their
workforce as trainees or whatever (they may be underpaid legally, so they
almost always are) and don't hire them after their time is up (ever, as a
rule). New trainees are then cycled into the slots that are now vacant.

------
BenoitEssiambre
There are groups of people that, through no fault of their own, are less
productive. Maybe they are young and inexperienced just out of school, maybe
they are older and have lower stamina, maybe they are rooted in a region where
it is costlier and more difficult for businesses to operate, maybe they are a
visible minority and are made less efficient by other people’s discriminatory
treatment, maybe they have a difficult family situation affecting them at
work, maybe they only have experience in industries where margins are thin
because of foreign competition or maybe they are innately just not good at the
type of activities that are profitable in today’s world.

Central banks affect job creating investment through interest rates. It may
seem like small interest rate changes wouldn’t make a big difference for
anyone once the effect propagates and is diluted across the whole economy.
However, looking at it through the lens of cost of capital where businesses
decide to do projects or not based on the expected profitability relative to
borrowing costs, it is easy to see that the effect is highly unequal. This
type of calculation implies a threshold, a cutoff where activities under a
certain level of profitability are completely stopped. The fact that interest
rates act as a threshold with regards to investment entails shutting down all
lower margin activities, those that tend to be manned by people that are
naturally disadvantaged.

This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be
afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of
the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having
a job.

The investment in equipment and buildings necessary to perform their work
disappears. Major projects get cancelled in isolated and disadvantaged rural
areas. Entry level positions that would be manned by the less experienced
disappear. Jobs that require less education also go away.

People who, in good times are already paid less and have little capacity to
bear a fall in revenue, don’t just bear a proportionate drop but a complete
fall to zero with often only meager government welfare to fall back on. On top
of the hit to dignity, it atrophies their skills and makes them further
disadvantaged and vulnerable. In the next cycle, they’re likely to again be
the first to be cutoff.

It’s difficult to overstate the utter cruelty of monetary mismanagement.

~~~
jdietrich
>This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be
afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of
the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having
a job.

Europe has been running rock-bottom interest rates since the 2008 crash. The
ECB are charging 0% on MRO lending and offering -0.4% on deposits. The BoE
have just increased rates from 0.25% to 0.5% in late 2017 due to rising
inflation. Both banks have spent most of the last decade flooding the markets
with money through QE.

It's hard to see what more they could do.

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
Zero is not rock bottom. A lot of stores of value have negative returns. Zero
is high in a lot of contexts.

Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before
financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you
didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate
stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were
subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or
required hard labor to get production out of.

Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free,
liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for most of history. This
just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything
tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most
things require maintenance to keep their worth.

The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of
unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real
returns were easy to find. The recency effect probably explains some of the
confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable
conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good
long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about
it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring
population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.

While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases,
you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time,
many can’t seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term
assets. In nature, squirrels’ nut caches have a certain percentage of losses
from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural
even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.

------
ekianjo
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.

~~~
yiyus
> it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the
> same level

It shows unemployment RATES, so population density does not matter.

~~~
danieldk
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 of the population.

~~~
ProblemFactory
> One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there

> In the other region there are 1M people

This has already been normalized: these are European NUTS-2 regions, which are
drawn to contain roughly equal populations. Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to
be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect, but it's not just
geographical borders with wildly different populations.

For example, London is split into 5 regions, most big cities are their own
region, and small countries are just one region. Going into even smaller
regions would be nice (and are defined in the standards as well), but it seems
that nobody has put in the effort to collect data at that granularity.

~~~
tom_mellior
> Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region.
> It's not perfect

It's far from perfect in some countries. The Community of Madrid with 6.5
million people is its own region (or Catalonia with 7.5 million); that's more
than Scotland, which is cut up into five NUTS-2 regions. The Paris region
(Île-de-France) has 12 million inhabitants, which is more than, say, Austria
or Hungary or the Czech Republic, each cut up according to more or less
traditional geographic divisions.

You have a point according to how NUTS _should_ work, the grandparent does
have a bit of a point according to what it's like _in practice_.

------
nkkollaw
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.

~~~
crispyporkbites
Is that anecdotal or fact? How many is many, many people?

~~~
nkkollaw
Well, by "under the table" I mean that those workers are unknown to the
government, so I don't think there is a way to know for sure. The government's
estimates are at ~15%. From my experience, most workers in agriculture and
food & beverages work under the table.

It's a very complicated subject--which I can talk about if you're interested--
but I don't know if you can really blame them. Taxes in Italy are almost 50%.
For years I've paid 45% in taxes and 1200/yr. for my accountant. In Poland, I
only pay 19% for taxes and 40/mo. for my accountant, and services to citizens
and public safety are about 1000 times better than Italy. It just feels wrong
to pay taxes in Italy: you don't have any money left, and whenever you need
something from the government it's a nightmare and done so badly that you feel
you're in a third-world country.

------
megaman22
With the exception of Bavaria, this almost looks like a map of historically
Protestant vs Catholic regions.

Also, what is so different about Macedonia compared to the surrounding regions
that it has such lower unemployment rates?

------
esbranson
For all interested, here is the "harmonized" OECD unemployment rate. It uses a
standard definition to compare the OECD countries.

[https://www.oecd.org/employment/harmonised-unemployment-
rate...](https://www.oecd.org/employment/harmonised-unemployment-rates-oecd-
updated-april-2018.htm)

[https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate-
hur...](https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate-hur.htm)

------
crispyporkbites
In case anyone is wondering what unemployed means in this context:

> An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of
> the International Labour Organization, as someone aged 15 to 74 without work
> during the reference week who is available to start work within the next two
> weeks and who has actively sought employment at some time during the last
> four weeks. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a
> percentage of the labour force.

------
tda
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

~~~
aclimatt
Just overlay a map of median temperatures and you'll have some interesting
insight.

~~~
dmerfield
The map of Protestants and Catholics is the one that leaps out at me as
aligning quite closely:

Religion:
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_Protestantism,_Orthodoxy_and_Islam_in_Europe.jpg)

Unemployment: [http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-
and...](http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and-Turkey-
unemployment-rates.jpg)

------
jankotek
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... ;-)

~~~
maephisto
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Is it still? It's a human rights nightmare and I don't think the EU should
have anything to do with Turkey while Erdogan is still in power.

~~~
rsynnott
It's still a candidate. It's moving backwards rather than forwards on its
acceptance criteria, and realistically won't be joining anytime soon, but it's
still a candidate.

------
mishkovski
The unemployment rate in Republic of Macedonia is like that for almost three
decades. More than 25%.

------
dasanman
Strange choice of color scheme

~~~
pc86
What is strange about it?

~~~
dx034
Low numbers go towards red, high numbers towards blue. Often, red implies
something bad so that's a bit confusion. I guess it's the standard scheme for
low/high numbers at eurostat.

------
donttrack
Explains why I keep getting job offers from Norway and Southern Germany..

------
heavenlyhash
That's

\- one picture

\- a whole lot of non-sequitur.

------
barrkel
> _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...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-s-unemployment-
rate-drops-to-a-record-low-of-58-a3250981.html) describes London's
unemployment rate reaching 5.8% as a record low!

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

~~~
barrkel
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.

------
solatic
Not included in the chart: Israeli unemployment at 3.6%

[http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-unemployment-in-israel-
fa...](http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-unemployment-in-israel-falls-to-new-
low-1001233871)

~~~
rsynnott
Israel isn't an EU, EEA or EFTA member, or candidate for EU membership.

~~~
solatic
Can people really still point at Turkey and call it a serious candidate for EU
membership?

There is a serious case for including Israeli figures in this kind of pan-
regional not-exclusively-EU analysis. Israel is far closer, culturally, to
Europe than geographically closer neighbors (e.g. Morocco, Tunisia) and is
increasingly part of European academic, sporting, and artistic interests (most
recently thinking of Eurocrypt 2018, which was in Tel Aviv this week, and this
year's Giro D'Italia, which is starting in Israel this weekend).

There are strong historical reasons why Israel will never apply to be a member
of the EU or to adopt the Euro - but a perspective is to think of Israel as
strongly Eurosceptic. Can anyone really look at Eurosceptic parties on the
Continent and say that, what, the EU defines what it means to be European?
That Hungary is no longer culturally European or that it dropped off the
Continent because Viktor Orbán got elected Prime Minister?

~~~
rsynnott
As things stand, currently, Turkey's candidacy isn't going to be going forward
anytime soon. But that's not the point. It is an official candidate, so
Eurostat keeps an eye on it. If Israel became a candidate, Eurostat would do
ditto (though for practical reasons Israel also won't be a candidate anytime
soon).

Incidentally, Turkey is also in a customs union with the EU, the only non-
EU/EEA/EFTA country of any significant size to be in one. This gives Eurostat
added incentive to keep an eye on it.

Israel is a member of or involved in various non-EU pan-European things (EBU,
Council of Europe etc), but Eurostat is an EU thing, not a European thing.

