lbo-talk-digest V1 #1539

jmage at panix.com jmage at panix.com
Sat Jun 19 08:33:01 PDT 1999


Doug -

What happens if you do GDP per employed person? Is Italy at the top of the list?

john mage


>
>J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
>
>> 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



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