> Well, another problem in comparing Europe and
>the US is the very high rate of people in prison in the
>US especially minority males. They do not get counted
>as part of the labor force and this is a serious distortion
>in making international comparisons. As a percent of
>the working age population, employment is not all that
>much higher in the US than in Western Europe, if at all.
Depends on how you define "all that much higher," I guess. Here are the 1997/98 employment/pop ratios (the share of the working-age population actually employed) according to the BLS, massaged into something like international comparability:
US 64.1 Japan 60.2 Canada 59.7 Australia 59.2 UK 58.3 Sweden 57.8 Neth 57.4 France 48.3 Germany 48.1 Italy 41.9
If you counted all prisoners as unemployed, it would lower the U.S. EPR by about 0.5 percentage point overall. But for black men, it would lower the EPR by a disgraceful 5.3 percentage points.
Doug