[lbo-talk] Roubini

Patrick Bond pbond at mail.ngo.za
Sat Dec 13 07:00:42 PST 2008


Fair enough, we've had a miserable time trying to correct South Africa natioanl accounts when they keep getting tweaked. Unemployment was redefined several times. Very irritating.

But what about the changing nature of employment? Does its degeneration and casualisation over the past quarter century get adequately reduced to an unemployment #? I ask without a good sense of how part-time jobs are counted, how underemployment may have changed as a result, how informal sector activity is understood. Anyhow, not to belabor these matters... but if we do see huge job cuts in various industries yet a relatively small rise in the unemployment rate, we'd want to hear more about whether the average wage/income per household is taking the hit, even if 'employment' #s don't bounce down.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list