European Unemployment Not Out of Woods

Tim Strauts: Today we are going to look at unemployment trends in the G-7 developed nations. In this chart, on the vertical axis, you have the total unemployment rate for each country. And on the horizontal axis, you have the change in unemployment over the last year, with decreasing unemployment to the right and increasing unemployment to the left.

When you look at the bubbles, the size of the bubble indicates the number of millions of people unemployed in each country. As you can see, the U.S. has the largest bubble, at 10.4 million unemployed.

When we look the different trends on the chart, you can see there's a clear clustering of countries with the U.S. Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom all clustered around the same region, all with unemployment below 8% and slightly decreasing unemployment rates all less than a 1% decrease over the last 12 months.

The two outliers on the chart, Italy and France, both have unemployment rates over 10%. In the case of Italy, its unemployment rate is actually still increasing over the last 12 months. Even with stock markets in Europe up strongly over the last 12 months, the economies in Europe are not out of the woods yet.