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Globaliseringen får mycket svårare konsekvenser än vad nästan alla ekonomer tror,
hävdar professorerna Mats Persson och Marian Radetzki
Johan Schück, DN 8/1 2006 med bra länkar
Ur Marian Radetzkis bok "Klarspråk om arbetslöshet" (SNS Förlag, 1996) sid 34 ff och 81 ff, utdrag.
Ett enkel, mekaniskt, men ändå lärorikt sätt att spalta upp arbetslöshetproblemet bygger på följande samband:
Tillväxt i BNP minus ökning i produktivitet minus ökning i arbetsstyrkan = förändring i arbetslösheten.
Om BNP stiger med 3,2 procent och produktiviteten samtidigt ökar med 2,2 procent och antalet personer i arbetskraften ökar med 0,5 procent minskar arbetslösheten med 0,5 procentenheter.
"Sambandet är just ett samband. Så måste det helt enkelt vara."
'Just a bad trend' - 500,000 jobless claims
"You can sometimes dismiss a big number and say , 'Oh, it's just one week,'" Quinlan added. "But with the four-week moving average continuing higher, you can see this is just a bad trend."
CNN August 19, 2010
Englund's Q
How come that unemployment is rising when the recession is over?
It is the productivity, Stupid
For employment to rise GDP must increase more than Productivity (P), of course
ΔGDP/ΔP gives a nice Q
Rolf Englund 4/12 2009
I have been thinking about this since I read Marian Radetzki in 1996.
Of course it is obvious. But the important thing is to understand its importance.
Tobin's q
Wikipedia
Is America facing an increase in structural unemployment?
When an economy experiences a severe recession associated with a sharp decline in aggregate demand, we should not begin by asking whether structural unemployment is the problem.
Instead, we should first try to see how much of the unemployment can be explained by nominal shocks.
Structural unemployment is a sort of residual; it represents those long-term unemployed that would be without jobs even if aggregate demand was on target.
Scott Sumner The Economist July 25th 2010
Helping the long-term jobless in a prolonged recession is generally a bipartisan issue,
but this time, Republicans argued that the measure will add too much to the national debt.
Heidi Shierholz, Washington Post, July 25, 2010
It's a discussion that gets bogged down in myths about how to assist the long-term unemployed, and the economy, at the same time.
---
Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question:The number of unemployed Americans fell by 350,000 - and the unemployment rate fell to 9.5 per cent.
But consider that this was mainly due to a reduction in the civilian labour force of 652,000 workers.
FT blog Moneysupply July 2, 2010
Basically, many of those Americans who started searching for jobs in the Spring, hoping that the tide was turning in their favour, are now discouraged again. That loss of confidence is surely the ugliest part of this report
Mats Svegfors har i sin betraktelse (98-03-14) i SvD förundrats över att det är så gott om jobb i USA och så ont om jobb i Sverige.
Svegfors äldsta dotter har nämligen haft en utbytesstudent från USA hos sig. Den unga damen har förundrats över att det är så ont om jobb i Sverige, medan det är så gott om jobb i USA.
Svegfors delar denna förundran.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, estimates
about 2.4 million “missing workers” either left the labor force or did not enter it in the last 28 months.
That is on top of the 15.3 million people who are officially counted as unemployed.
New York Times, 4 Jun 2010
GDP report: Sharp slowdown in economic growth
Revised sharply lower to an annual growth rate of 1.6%
The initial reading had been for a 2.4% growth rate in the period
CNN August 27, 2010
...
The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment.
We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising,
and much faster growth to bring it significantly down.
Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead.
If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.
All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.
Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 26, 2010
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
The U.S. economy must grow at least 3 percent to create enough jobs for new entrants into the labor force
CNBC 21 Dec 2009
See also Bloomberg
U.S. Economy Lost 216,000 Jobs in August
after falling by a revised 276,000 in July and 463,000 in June.
Total loss of jobs since the recession began in December 2007 - 6.9 million.
RGE Monitor 2009-09-07
Remember, it takes 150,000 jobs per month (or so) simply to maintain the employment rate, due to growth in the population.
John Mauldin's Weekly E-Letter February 8, 2008
Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back.
For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway:
dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.
New York Times 13 May 2010
The phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through less painful means like attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs. But because of the recession, winter came early.
Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, the U.S. economy has shed 8.4 million jobs
and failed to create another 2.7 million required by an ever-larger pool of potential workers.
Robert Reich 12/4 2010
What’s likely to slow the jobs recovery most, however, is the indubitable reality that many of the jobs that have been lost will never return. The Great Recession has accelerated a structural shift in the economy that had been slowly building for years.
The likelihood, therefore, is that as the economy struggles to recover and today’s jobless begin to find work, the median wage will continue to fall—as it did between 2001 and 2007, during the last so-called recovery.
Factor-price equalization - Faktorprisutjämning
The US Job Numbers for September
263,000 more jobs lost in September, and unemployment now at 9.8 percent
The only reason the numbers don't look worse is that 571,000 workers dropped out of the labor force.
Remember that the economy needs about 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with a growing population.
Robert Reich 2/10 2009
Meredith Whitney says unemployment will rise again
So, retail sales are up. Unemployment is down. And the Dow is near 11,000.
That doesn't mean that all is right with the world.
CNN Money April 8, 2010
The analyst who brought down the bank stocks in 2007–by shining the light on their capital shortfalls–came by Fortune's offices Wednesday afternoon to explain why she's still a bear. I asked her: Will unemployment, now at 9.7%, likely go back up? "I think it has to," she told us.
Pointing out that banks are still cutting credit lines (to the tune of $2.7 trillion by 2011, she predicts) and states are strapped financially (implying tax increases and service cuts to come), Whitney is betting against a bona-fide recovery.
Meredith Whitney, whose research note on Citigroup in late October triggered a $369bn sell-off in global equities........
Meredith Whitney
Wikipedia
Nearing Retirement and Unemployed or Underemployed
One of the groups seriously impacted by the great recession is the "pre retirement" generation - currently the "Baby Boomers" - the workers between the ages of 45 and 64.
CalculatedRisk 13/3 2010
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke:
"Indeed, more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work six months or more, nearly double the share of a year ago,"
CNN February 24, 2010
The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month
With the latest monthly tally, 8.4 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007.
Another 2.7 million jobs needed to absorb new workers were never created, leaving the economy bereft of 11.1 million jobs.
New York Times editorial March 5, 2010
To fill that hole, while keeping up with a growing work force, would require more than 400,000 new jobs a month for three years
Employers are unlikely to make new hires until they restore current workers to full time. In the private sector, just restoring hours cut during the recession will be like adding 2.8 million jobs, without a single hire.
Full textThe unemployment rate for teenagers remains at 26.4 percent, while 15.5 percent of African Americans and 12.4 percent of Hispanics can’t find jobs.
Seventeen states, along with the District of Columbia, still have jobless rates well in the double digits, and the fate of the long-term unemployed is terrifying.
Newsweek 4 June 2010
Forty-six percent of the 15 million people out-of-work in this country has been unemployed for 27 weeks or more (quick math: that’s more than six months). That number—the worst since the Great Depression—shows no signs of subsiding.
“We're still in a tremendous labor market hole,” says Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “It will take four-and-half more years of consecutive months of job growth to get back to where the labor market was before the downturn.”
Even then in 2007, Katz points out that the labor market was hardly rosy. Unemployment had not yet skyrocketed, but workers put up with stagnant wage growth.
At the level of the early 80s.
A very nice graph shows the employment-population ratio;
this is the ratio of employed Americans to the adult population.
Calculated Risk 5 March 2010
The Labor Force Participation Rate increased slightly to 64.8% (the percentage of the working age population in the labor force). This is at the level of the early 80s.
The US unemployment rate fell unexpectedly from 10 percent to 9.7 percent in January,
as black unemployment remained high at 16.5 percent.
/thedailyvoice.com febr 2010
Total job loss from the start of the recession to 8.4 million.
Tim Iacono 2010-02-05
"USA har ryckt åt sig ett stort försprång och har världens mest framgångsrika ekonomi"
Klas Eklund på SvD:s ledarsida 2000-08-11
U.S. payrolls fell but the unemployment rate dropped
The number of "discouraged job seekers" rose to 1.1 million in January from 734,000 a year ago.
CNBC 5 Feb 2010
The US long-term unemployed now make up roughly 40% of all unemployed.
That's more than six million people
BBC 5 February 2010
Take the problem of long-term unemployment. In the eyes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which does the counting, the long-term unemployed are people who have been unemployed for more than six months.
They now make up roughly 40% of all unemployed. That's more than six million people who have been out work since last summer at least.
Unemployment is always nasty. But it's even worse when it's accompanied not just by stress and anxiety but by real deprivation. That is the experience of increasing numbers of Americans as unemployment benefits run out before the next job can be found.
Whether they're "unemployed," "marginally attached" or "discouraged," they're all still suffering in what President Obama's economic advisor Larry Summers recently called the "human recession".
And while their lack of a job may not be counted in the headline numbers, come the November mid-term elections, their votes will be.
Full textStår USA inför en revolutionär situation?
Rolf Englund blog 2010-01-26
Kommentar av RE: Ja, jag är väl för tidigt ute, som vanligt.
The curse of long-term unemployment
Only about 400,000 more Americans were employed in December 2009 than in December 1999,
while the population grew by nearly 30m.
The Economist print Jan 14th 2010
Around four in every ten of the unemployed—some 6m Americans—have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That is the highest rate since this particular record began, in 1948.
Unemployment in the eurozone 10 per cent for the first time since the introduction of the single currency.
Despite extraordinary measures to protect the labour market during the downturn, 4m have lost jobs across the 16 countries that use the euro, according to the European Commission’s statistical arm.
FT January 8 2010
“The actual unemployment rate is higher than shown by the official numbers,”
Had the labor force not decreased by 661,000 last month, the jobless rate would have been 10.4 percent
Bloomberg 2010 Jan. 9
The so-called underemployment rate -- which includes part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking -- rose to 17.3 percent in December from 17.2 percent.
The number of discouraged workers, those not looking for work because they believe none is available, climbed to 929,000 last month, the most since records began in 1994.
"Det är mycket annat som inverkar på om anställningarna skall öka, däribland konjunkturutvecklingen.
En väntad nedgång i USA blir märkbar också i svensk ekonomi."
Att få ut fler som aktivt söker arbete är förhållandevis enkelt.
Svårare är att få arbetsgivare att anställa fler, utöver vad de ändå hade gjort
Johan Schück, DN Ekonomi 23/9 2006
…
Lösgör den ekonomiska politiken från EMU-reglernas tvångströja
Det sista momentet i det ändamålsenliga programmet mot arbetslösheten gäller den makroekonomiska politikens utformning. Restriktiv ekonomisk politik och därav betingad begränsning i totalefterfrågan utgör en bidragande orsak till arbetslösheten i Västeuropa under 1990-talet.
Det råder förstås delade uppfattningar om graden av restriktivitet i de ekonomiskt-politiska åtgärderna. Mellan 1992 och 1995 redovisar EU-länderna ett genomsnittligt offentligt budgetunderskott på 5,7 procent av BNP (IMF, 1996). Med traditionella keynesianska mått utgör detta en utomordentligt kraftfull stimulans för efterfrågan i makroekonomin.
Budgetunderskottet är ohållbart stort och måste minskas, för att förhindra en explosion av statsskulderna.
Ekonomiska stimulanser från finanspolitiken blir därför möjliga enbart genom omstrukturering av offentliga inkomster och utgifter, inte genom att man ökar budgetunderskottet.
Följaktligen är det främst lättnader i den otvetydigt restriktiva penningpolitiken som är genomförbara.
De önskvärda effekterna av återhållsamhet i penningpolitiken måste vägas mot den ytterligare arbetslöshet som sådan sådan politik skapar.
Insiktsfulla bedömare, särskilt från andra sidan Atlanten, (Dornbusch, 1994; Krugman, 1996), anser att Västeuropas regeringar blivit alltför trollbundna av EMU-kraven, och att den höga arbetslösheten motiverar mera expansiva åtgärder på det penningpolitiska området, nu när inflationen fallit till efterkrigstidens lägsta nivå.
Jag delar denna uppfattning.
De tidigare diskuterade åtgärderna i programmet är i själva verket en förutsättning för att det ska gåp att släppa loss den ekonomiska politiken i expansiv riktning, utan risk för inflation.... Med en flexibelt fungerande arbetsmarknad minskar denna risk betydligt.
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Dornbusch, R.(1994) "Is There a Role for Demand Policy"?, Swedish Economic Policy Review, vol. 1, nr 1-2
Krugman, P. (1996) Pop Internationalism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.