Europe’s Job Market vs US – Doing better

Compare unemployment rates, and America’s job market looks much stronger than Europe’s. The U.S. rate for August, being released Friday, is expected to be a near-normal 6.1 percent. In the 18 countries that use the euro currency, by contrast, it’s a collective 11.5 percent. 

Yet by some measures, Europe is doing better. It’s been more successful in keeping people working, letting the disabled stay on the job and boosting the proportion of women in the workforce.

And Europeans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — are more likely to be employed than Americans are.

Fewer than 77 percent of prime-age Americans have jobs, compared with 80 percent in Belgium, 81 percent in France and 82 percent in the Netherlands, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

If Americans ages 25 to 54 were as likely to be working as Germans the same age, 8.3 million more Americans would have jobs.

“Where we used to talk about the U.S. having a high-powered labor market in the late 1990s, Germany has that now,” says Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

It’s true, of course, that the unemployed have a much harder time finding a job in, say, Spain or Greece than the United States. Spain’s unemployment rate is nearly 25 percent. For people under 25, the rate tops 50 percent.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  Europe’s Job Market Has Strengths the US Doesn’t – The Epoch Times.