Thursday, January 24, 2013
Young Wild & Jobless in Spain
In this recent article on bbc.co.uk it gives an overview to a rising problem of unemployment for youths from ages 16-24 years old in Spain and other European countries. The current unemployment rate in Spain is 24.3% which is even larger than the rate in Greece who is still recovering from their recent economical collapse. Of the 24.3% unemployed 51.5% of those people are under 25 years old. This being said these numbers of the youth that are unemployed cause more of a ruckus then there truly is because throughout the article it switches back and forth between the jobless rate and the unemployment rate. This being said it would be a more accurate measure to use the unemployment rate when assessing the problem with youth unemployment because the jobless rate includes college students who cannot work even if they wanted to. These numbers though do shed light on a growing problem in Eurozone where the Eurostat estimates there were 5.8 million people under 25 that were unemployed, which is around 23.7% and 3.73 million in the Eurozone (24.4%).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21180371
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Great thoughts on the inconsistency of the terms used in the article Alex. I think the tittle of the article which is "Spain unemployment rate hit a record: youth rate at 55%" is very misleading because it seems to me that 55% is actually not the unemployment rate among the youth, but rather the jobless rate. As you have noted above, jobless rate includes even the people who are still in school as long as they fall into the age range. What I don't understand though is why would they make the age range from 16 to 24, knowing that most people under 21 is still going to school.
ReplyDeleteInteresting story. However, you had the unemployment rate at 24.3%, whereas the article says, "Official data showed that the jobless rate in the last three months of 2012 rose 1% to 26%, or 5.97 million people."
ReplyDeleteAlso, most people use jobless rate and unemployment rate interchangeably, so I wouldn't pay any attention to that. It's interesting to see that unemployment rates in Spain are calculated differently than they are in the US, but I don't think there is actually a difference between jobless rate and unemployment rate for the purposes of this story. As a journalism major, I can tell you that people aren't taught technical economic terms. It's up to the journalist to know what the official terminology is, which this journalist clearly did not do. "Jobless rate" is a colloquially acceptable equivalent to "unemployment rate" in most circles but you probably won't see it in academic papers because, as you know, it's a misnomer.