German unemployment rate drops below 5% for the first time

[Tender Branson]

At least since records after re-unification began in 1991 (based on the international ILO-method):

WIESBADEN – 2014-08-28: In July 2014, roughly 42.6 million persons resident in Germany were in employment according to provisional calculations of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Compared with July 2013, this was an increase of 344,000 persons or 0.8%. Hence, the year-on-year rate of growth was as high as in the months from April to June. In July 2014, roughly 2.0 million people were unemployed, 215,000 fewer than a year earlier.



According to provisional results of the employment accounts, the number of persons in employment increased by 51,000, or 0.1%, from June 2014 to July 2014. However, on an average of the last five years, the number of persons in employment in July had been down by 5,400 from the previous month. After seasonal adjustment, that is, after the elimination of the usual seasonal fluctuations, the number of persons in employment increased by 46,000, or 0.1%, in July 2014 compared with the previous month.

Results of the labour force survey show that 2.03 million people were unemployed in July 2014. Compared with July 2013, their number decreased by 215,000, or 9.4%. Compared with June 2014, the number of unemployed fell by 93,000 or 4.2%. Adjusted for seasonal and irregular effects, the number of unemployed stood at 2.09 million. The adjusted unemployment rate was down by 0.1 percentage points from the previous month, reaching 4.9%.  

https://www.destatis.de/EN/PressServices/Press/pr/2014/08/PE14_301_132.html

[King]

How does Germany calculate unemployment compared to US? What is the participation rate in Germany?

[AggregateDemand]

Applaus, Deutschland. Alles gute mit deiner Zukunft.

Jetzt Kanzler Merkel, können Sie mit Italien, Spanien, und Greichenland helfen? Kein mehr Strenge? Danke.

No freshman German composition, please.

It's nice to see the evolution of socialism in northern Europe. Once upon a time, socialism was a silly pipe-dream that sought to equalize outcomes. Modern socialism seeks to equalize means and opportunity. Though modern socialism still has glaring inefficiencies and immoral paternalism, it's amazing to see its evolution on the European continent.

Sweden, Norway, and Germany deserve credit for their contribution to modern socioeconomics. As Clark said, it will be interesting to see if Germany can use their success to raise all ships in the EU harbor.

[Tender Branson]

How does Germany calculate unemployment compared to US? What is the participation rate in Germany?

Germany (like most other EU countries) has 2 ways of calculating the unemployment rates:

* The national method: If you become unemployed, you visit your local unemployment office which will register you as unemployed to get benefits. According to this method, the current unemployment rate is 6.7% (seasonally adjusted).

* The ILO/Eurostat method: This is the internationally comparable method (the US method is also based on this). It's usually a large telephone survey or employees from the Statistics office visit households to gather the data from people. The definition of "employment" and "unemployment" are much more loose in this method:

Excerpt:

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Of course, the bolded red parts explain much of the difference between the register-method and the more loose ILO-method.

(I mean, expanding the labour force by using a 15-74 span ? Asking unemployed if they have worked at least 1 hour a week ? How many (registered) unemployed will tell a phone pollster or a private interviewer that they worked at least 1 hour, when in fact they are registered at the Labour office ? Probably not few.)

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Which means the ILO method might be nice to compare the UE rates internationally, but the registered method shows a much better picture of the actual situation.

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As for labour force participation:

The OECD had 51.7% for Germany and 49.8% for the US.

(Total labour force in % of total population)

http://www.oecd.org/statistics