debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
We are getting used to bad news about the labour market situation in Europe. Record-breaking 12% unemployment in the euro area. More than 26 million men and women unemployed across the EU27. More than a quarter of the workforce jobless in Spain and Greece. Youth unemployment rates (which need careful interpretation) around twice as high. [...]
Talk about statistics and the EU and the things likely to spring to people’s mind are the fiddling of the Greek fiscal accounts or, in Germany at least, doubts that the official inflation rate was really telling the true story of how – allegedly – expensive everything had become after the introduction of the euro. [...]
The head of Greece’s statistics agency, Andreas Georgiou, is to face a criminal inquiry. An ex-employee of the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), Zoe Georganta, has accused him of colluding with the European Union’s statistical arm, Eurostat, to inflate Greece’s deficit figure for 2009, thereby justifying Greece’s EU-IMF bailout, signed in May 2010, and its drastic [...]
The latest quarterly GDP figures confirm the already pessimistic expectations. Europe is sliding back into recession. In both the euro area and the EU27 growth output contracted by 0.2% in the second quarter. This followed on stagnation in the first quarter and a decline of 0.3% in the last quarter of 2011. (In each case [...]
The latest Eurostat flash estimate shows that at least nine EU countries are in recession, having posted negative economic growth in both the first quarter of 2012 and the last of 2012. In four of these Member States that makes three consecutive quarters of contraction and in Greece and Portugal output has been falling for [...]
An additional almost 200,000 Europeans were unemployed in March compared with February according to the latest Eurostat data. Of these the vast majority were in the euro area (169,000). The pace at which the labour market situation is deteriorating is, if anything, accelerating. Since March 2011, when ill-advised austerity and monetary policy tightening began to [...]
Unemployment in Europe continues its inexorable climb upward. Eurostat reported today that in February 17.13 million people were unemployed in the euro area and 24.55 million in the EU27. New records, as you can see from Eurostat’s own chart below. A rather clearer picture of the policy-making disaster that this represents emerges [...]
The primary objective of the ECB is to maintain price stability, and it measures price stability in terms of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP).[1] As the main European indicator of inflation, the HICP is therefore an extremely important policy variable. On account of methodological difficulties, Eurostat omits owner-occupied housing (OOH) from the HICP.[2] This is problematic, as [...]
So a British government minister has come out and said that (Britain’s) unemployment problem is due to the laziness of the unemployed. There is no shortage of jobs, she announced, pointing to the more than 400,000 vacancies registered with UK unemployment offices. OK, this is really so dumb that I am tempted not to bother. [...]
Today’s unemployment numbers are not just depressing. They should make policymakers ashamed and everyone else extremely angry. 23.8 million men and women in the EU27, and 16.5 million in the euro area, were unemployed in December 2011. This is more than 20,000 more than in November, and the November figures have themselves been revised upwards [...]
The ECB raised interest rates on 13 April and again on 13 July. That that was a mistake was evident at the time (here and here). We have since seen how the predicted worsening of the situation for peripheral countries has indeed come to pass. As of today we have 150,000 more reasons to protest [...]
Eurostat’s flash estimate of second quarter GDP growth shows a substantial and widespread slowdown in the rate of growth: compared with 0.8% in the first quarter, both the EU27 and the euro area expanded by just 0.2% in the second quarter. Growth at an annual rate of just 0.8% (the above rates are quarter-on-quarter) is [...]
All Content