The 15,000 additional jobs lost in April brings total job losses in the government sector since January 2010 to over 500,000. While the US has not quite been experiencing European-style austerity over the past two years, that's still a pretty tough headwind to fight as it emerges from recession.
Friday, May 04, 2012
Government Job Destruction
The 15,000 additional jobs lost in April brings total job losses in the government sector since January 2010 to over 500,000. While the US has not quite been experiencing European-style austerity over the past two years, that's still a pretty tough headwind to fight as it emerges from recession.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Eurozone Unemployment and the Recession of 2012
But while the prospect of a European recession in 2012 is quite bad enough, this understates the scope of the problem. Because not only will this year's recession directly impact millions of unemployed and soon-to-be unemployed EU workers, as well as (for those more fiscally minded) seriously damaging this year's government budget balances, it will have lingering effects on Europe's economies for many years to come.
Hysterisis is the notion that the state of the world today has lingering effects on the future. In the context of labor markets this primarily arises because the state of being unemployed tends to make it harder for workers to find a new job, and the longer someone is unemployed the harder it becomes. Unemployment -- especially long term unemployment -- therefore has permanent negative effects on an economy even after economic growth has resumed. Unemployment today damages the economy's potential tomorrow.
This should be of particular concern for European policy makers, because the European labor markets have proven to be particularly slow to recover from recessions.
To get a rough sense of this, I calculated the weighted-average annual unemployment rate of what I call the "EZ6" -- the six largest eurozone economies, i.e. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium -- over the past 20 years. If we compare the EZ6 unemployment rate with real GDP growth over those years, we find that every percentage point of real GDP growth reduces the unemployment rate by about 0.33 percentage points. In other words, for every percentage point that the unemployment rate goes up in the EZ6 this year, those economies will need
This is significantly longer than in the US. For the US, every percentage point of real GDP growth causes the unemployment rate to fall by almost 0.5 percentage points, meaning that it takes about two years of growth that is 1.0% above trend to undo a one point rise in the unemployment rate, rather than three.
The following chart shows the fall in unemployment rates after the past three recessions in the US. Unemployment rates have been normalized in each case so that the peak rate of unemployment is set equal to 100.
Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), the current unemployment recovery in the US is roughly on par with the previous two recessions. Granted, those previous two recessions were also characterized by frustratingly slow improvements in the labor markets (so presumably we should still hope to do better), but it's nice to be able to place our unhappiness with the present labor market recovery in some context.
The next picture shows the same thing for the EZ6, and makes clear that unemployment increases in the eurozone tend to be considerably more sticky. Sometimes, it appears, what goes up comes down only very, very slowly. Even during the relatively successful recovery of 2005-2008 the EZ6 unemployment rate only dropped to about 81% of its peak.
To be fair, it's important to recognize that unemployment rates also tend to rise more slowly in Europe than in the US. In 2009, for example, the unemployment rate in the US rose by 3.5 percentage points, while in the EZ6 the unemployment rate only rose by 1.6 pp. However, this doesn't take the sting out of the fact that when unemployment rates do rise in the eurozone -- as they are doing now -- their negative repercussions last considerably longer than in the US.
European policy-makers need to remember this fact. Their misguided fixation on austerity as the solution to the eurozone's crisis has done a lot to push Europe back into recession. But importantly, the damage and pain caused by this will not just be felt in 2012, but rather for many years to come.
Furthermore, this considerably increases the likelihood that expansionary fiscal policy (i.e. tax cuts and/or more government spending) in Europe would actually pay for itself and
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