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Unemployment statistics
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Вариант 2


^ UNEMPLOYMENT STATISTICS

Unemployment can be divided into three basic types: frictional, structural and cyclical. Frictional unemployment as short – term unemployment that results from such factors as individuals voluntary switching jobs, fired employees seeking reemployment, employees seeking their first job and the seasonal pattern of employment in such industries as construction and recreation.

Structural unemployment refers to long – term unemployment caused by changes in consumer demand and changes in technology. These types of changes cause some workers to become unemployed for long periods of time or permanently. Because of changes in the nature of the economy, the talents of some workers become obsolete. Structural unemployment is not caused by general business fluctuations, nor does it involve the normal movement of workers from one ob to another.

Cyclical unemployment refers to unemployment caused by business fluctuations. This situation occurs when the economy is in recession or depression and aggregate demand is insufficient to maintain full employment. When the overall level of business activity decreases, cyclical unemployment increases. Conversely, when overall business activity picks up, cyclical unemployment drops. A prominent economist, Arthur Okun, quantified the relationship between unemployment and GDP. This relationship, called Okun’s law, indicates that the rate of unemployment declines by one percentage point for every two-percentage points of increase in the rate of economic growth.

Full employment does not mean zero unemployment. Frictional and structural unemployment are unavoidable, thus the definition of full employment allows for less than 100% employment. One way to explain full employment is to say that it is achieved when cyclical unemployment is zero. But any definition of full employment is going to change as the demographics of the labor force change, institutional factors change, and the economy evolves.

Employment report. The employment report is the single most important data series released by the government to both the bond and stock markets because it is both timely and a comprehensive measure of economic activity. Included in the report is the unemployment rate, which is determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a nationwide random survey of 60,000 households per month. The unemployment report is released on the first Friday of the month at ссылка скрыта.

Although the unemployment rate is the most widely reported statistics, this rate is a lagging indicator of the state of the economy. Instead, the market focuses upon the change in nonfarm payrolls, hours worked, and hourly pay. These numbers help predict whether the economy is strengthening, and if labor costs are accelerating or moderating.

The payroll survey collects data on jobs, hourly wages and the number of hours in the workweek from about 400,000 companies covering nearly 50 industries. The total change in payroll reflects economic activity. A big jump means companies are hiring in response to rising sales. A drop implies that companies are reducing their labor force in response to weakening sales.

In the recent past the economic consensus was that at unemployment levels of less than about 6%, inflation was bound to accelerate. Yet joblessness had been 5% or less for 32 straight months by the end of 1999, and inflation had declined steadily through the 1990s, hitting a 12 – year low in 1998. the Fed has expressed its concern about tight labor markets by raising interest rates three times in 1999 and again in February, March and May of 2000. although advances in information technology and the expanded use of the Internet may continue to stimulate efficiencies and lower costs, productivity growth must continue to increase rapidly to prevent unit labor costs from accelerating and heightening fears of inflation.

Вариант 3


INCOME

The second of the three economic issues is the question of income, that is, income distribution, the way in which income – that is what people earn – is distributed or shared around.

You, and your family, have an income. You have an annual income, that is what you earn in a year. This income allows you to enjoy various goods and services. It means that you have a certain standard of living. Your standard of living, of course, includes what you think of as necessary to your life, things like food, water, somewhere to live, health and education. But your income does not just cover the necessities of life. It also includes recreation, whether that is sport or TV or a holiday. Your income will be less than some of your neighbors, but it will be more than some of your other neighbors. Your neighbors mean not just people living in your own country, but also people living in other countries.

Just as you and your family have an income, so nations, and different countries, also have an income – the national income, it’s often called. A national income is not the money the government gets. The national income is the sum total of the incomes of all the people living in that country, in other words, everyone’s income added together. In the same way one can think of the world income as the total of all incomes earned by all the people in the world.

Concerning the distribution of national and world income, some questions are to be asked: who in the world gets what share of these incomes? The distribution of income, either in the world or in a country, tells us how income is divided between different groups or individuals. Table 1 shows the distribution of world income. There are three headings down the left-hand side of the table: income per head, percentage of world population and percentage of world income. In poor countries, like India, China and Sudan, the income per head is only one hundred and fifty-five pounds per year. But at the same time, they have fifty point seven per cent of the world’s population. These poor countries only have five per cent of the world’s income.

In middle-income countries the income per head is eight hundred and forty pounds, that’s the countries like Thailand and Brazil. In the major oil countries, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it’s even thousand, six hundred and seventy. In industrial countries it’s six thousand, two hundred and seventy.

Turning to the middle – income countries again, they have twenty-five point one per cent of world population, with fourteen point two per cent of world income. The major oil countries have point four per cent of population, the industrial countries fifteen point six. The oil countries have one point five per cent of world income, the industrial countries sixty-four point eight.

The first economic question is for whom does the economy produce? As the table shows, it produces essentially for the people living in the rich industrial countries. They get sixty per cent of the world’s income, although they only have sixteen per cent of its population. This suggests an answer to the second question, that is of what is produced. The answer is that most of world production will be directed towards the goods and services that these same rich industrialized countries want.

The third question is how goods are produced. In poor countries, with little machinery, not very much technical training and so on, workers produce much less than workers in rich countries. And poverty is very difficult to escape. It continues on and on. And this goes some way towards accounting for the differences in national incomes. In accounts for an unequal distribution of income, not just between countries but also between members of the same country, although there individual governments can help through taxation. In other words, governments can act to help distribute income throughout their population.