EconomicsEurope: Jobs: A list of jobloss percentages in several European countries

reWritten Nov19,2kk9


I found this in the niche blog, OurKingdom - power and liberty in Britain, that has been spun-off from and is linked to openDemocracy, a most formidible website. Tom Griffin writes an article in OurKingdom (Nov12,2k9):

When will the walls in Belfast come down?

As Ian Parsley noted at OurKingdom last year, the wall may be down in Berlin, but there are still plenty of them in Belfast. The BBC this week highlighted the work of some of the people who are trying to change that.

Among them is Tony Macaulay, who outlined the scale of the problem at a recent talk in London.

There are 88 barriers, they arent all walls. There are 88 what we would call interface barriers in Northern Ireland. There are a few in Derry/Londonderry, a few in Portadown/Craigavon. The vast majority are in Belfast. Most of them are in North Belfast. The biggest one is in West Belfast, separating the Falls from the Shankill, where I come from.

More barriers have gone up in the ten years following the ceasefires, than in the ten years before the ceasefires. These walls have continued to be erected through the peace process, through the political agreement, the ceasefires and all of that.

The most recent official one was erected in the grounds of an integrated primary school, And there are also now walls still being erected to this day in new private developments, where the private developer decides that people will want to live in an area more if there's a wall separating them from "the other side".

Historically-traumatized people are trying to create neiborhoods and streets that are safe for families and children.  There's apparently a certain tribality present, in which a pisteutic aspect is constantly at work, given the great historical face-off between Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, south of Northern Ireland's border, there's a resurge of the culture wars in the Irish Republic. Colin Murphy, a jouralist in Dublin, writes about the current face-off in Ireland's culture wars: "Ireland's new culture war" (Sept18,2k9 Prospect). The worry: voting for the Lisbon Treaty in the upcoming national referendum will result in the forced opening of Ireland to legal abortions, however paid for, perhaps thru the medical system? How does the EU's proposed Lisbon Treaty affect Irish abortion rates? You'll have to read the article for the intriguing answer.

Oh, I almost forgot: Ireland's unemployment rate -- 13% -- is the h+est in Europe for the period of time summarized.


Update Nov6,2k9:::I just found this item focussed directly on the most recent aggregates of Britain's current unemployment, so I can make comparisons.

Wednesday October 14, 11:53 AM
British unemployment rate steady at 7.9%: data


LONDON (AFP) - Britain's unemployment rate held at 7.9 percent in the three months to August, official data showed on Wednesday, holding stable on a quarterly basis for the first time since March 2008.
The news, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), comes amid rising hopes that data next week will show the British economy has officially exited a deep recession.

Market expectations had been for a rate of 8.0 percent. Since March 2008, the jobless rate has increased every subsequent month as companies slashed jobs to save cash amid the downturn.

However, the ONS added Wednesday that the number of people unemployed in Britain rose by just 88,000 people in the three months to August to reach 2.47 million people -- which is the highest level since 1995.

"The brief summary is that unemployment is going up but more slowly than economists expected," said ECU Group analyst Kit Juckes in a note to clients.
"Further rises in unemployment are inevitable but the trend in job losses is slowing," he added.

In addition, despite fears of a youth unemployment crisis, the number of unemployed young people seeking a job eased to 946,000 in the three months to August.

That compared with 947,000 young people in the three months to July, which was the highest figure since records began in 1992.

Working with the first table above -- "European Unemployment" where Ireland is registrerd as having the h+est rate of joblessness 13% -- and adding the figure in the news article about British Unemployment -- 7.9% -- while, the USA jobless rate has risen to 10.2. Interestingly, while unemployment is 13% in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, unemployment is a relatively low 7.1 %, also below Britain, and of course the USA these days.

Were we to analyze according to the American sociological paradigm, but indigenously to the Northern Ireland situation.  If we analyze the 7.1% relatively favourable figure into the whatever is the great tribal/clan/religion divide there, we woud have to ask what percentage of the figure as a total (7.1) is to be configured to the Cat minority as compared to the Prod majority.   Is the Prod unemployment figure 3.0, while the Cat unemployment figures is 4.1?  (My question is entirely hypothetical, but were it so, then one coud approach the historical specifics of why woud Prods have less unemployment than Cats?

Why the Ulster Prods have less unemployment than the larger entity the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 7.9 %?      Why the Prods + Cats in Northern Ireland are so superior to those of "Ireland"  which has the mostest at 13 % unemployed.  Overall the Ulster statistic lowers the UK statistic, which woud be h+er without Ulster's weiting the UK's downward.

Without figuring in NI, the Brit proper unemployment percentage woud be h+er.  Thus, the NI figure helps put a sl+tly better face on the Brit Island's present putative level, conjecturally but conservatively, I woud put the aggregate joblessness of England, Scotland, Wales, and the Duchy of East Lothian (without NI) actually above 8.0 %.

The job of UK reformationals confronted by these statistics woud be to get at least a two-way breakdown of unemployment by region (as above) and by tribal/clan/religion primarily along minority racial lines -- in order to discover whether members of various racial minorities in cosmopolitan Britain are less employed (without a money income) than the mainstream stocks of the racial majority which includes both Protestants and Catholics.

At each point, the reformational economics theorist m+t well ask "Why? Why this particular statistical occurence at this time for this region or ethnic grouping or religous grouping or whatever?  The priority analysis, usually, woud attempt to account for the differentials that appear in the main lines of tension and creativity in multiracial multiethnic multireligioned United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

-- EconoMix

-- EconoMix