Youth unemployment figures are a lens with which to see the diversity of Europe’s economies. They also show how much the world has changed since the financial crisis. Globally, nearly 290 million young people are neither working nor studying, calculates The Economist, almost a quarter of the planet’s youth. (via http://econ.st/14Vge2p)
austerity hasn’t been the path to prosperity. It’s been the path to perma-slump. (via Spain Is Beyond Doomed: The 2 Scariest Unemployment Charts Ever - Matthew O’Brien - The Atlantic)
Here’s the story of Spanish unemployment in three acts. During the boom, joblessness was relatively high due to persistent structural problems. Then it shot up fast and faster as Spain’s building bust and then Lehmangeddon hit in 2008. But it has kept climbing up since the panic abated, albeit at a less catastrophic pace, due to the toxic combination of too tight money and budgets.
In other words, unemployment is a trap people fall into, but can’t fall out of. Indeed, the rate of new unemployment has stabilized at a terrible, but not quite-as-terrible, level, as you can see with the flat blue, red, and green lines. But the steadily rising purple line shows us that the rate of job-finding for the jobless has collapsed.
That is what a permanent underclass looks like.
Large swathes of Wales are poorer than parts of Bulgaria, Romania and Poland and four-and-a-half times less prosperous than central London, according to latest official figures. The European Union (EU) statistics also reveal the UK has Europe’s highest inequality of wealth in Europe. The figures, issued by the EU’s statistical information body Eurostat, show Gross Domestic Product (GDP) throughout the EU for 2010 and the value of goods and services produced within each country per head of population. Taking 100 as the EU average across all 27 member states, Wales as a whole had a GDP per head of 81. But while East Wales managed to hit the 100 average, West Wales and the Valleys languished at 70, the lowest figure in the UK. The highest, for Inner London, was 328. At 70, West Wales and the Valleys was poorer than parts of Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and than the whole of the Czech Republic (80), Slovenia (84) and Slovakia (84) – all countries that were part of the East European Communist bloc that collapsed more than 20 years ago. (via Welsh Valleys ‘poorer than parts of Bulgaria, Romania and Poland’ - Wales News - News - WalesOnline)
