10 Comments
May 7, 2022Liked by Joseph Politano

It is hard to explain Japan being the #1 employer given it has been the worst performing economy (in terms of real growth) for the past 30 years!

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May 7, 2022Liked by Joseph Politano

Great article. To bear in mind after J Powell press conference where he insisted in labour market tightness. Happy to be a suscriber. Wonder how the US can go back to full capacity (those 9.160 usd…) without scaring inflation hawks in government & markets.

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May 7, 2022·edited May 7, 2022Liked by Joseph Politano

How does the story of bad monetary and fiscal policy being responsible for the large fall of Epop in the US square with the fact that aggregate demand policy was far more conservative in Europe? Despite much deeper austerity and a much later pivot to QE in Europe, Epop didn't fall by nearly as much as in the US, which we wouldn't expect if weak labor demand was the main issue

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Sorry for the late comment, but I was surprised to see that the employment-population ratio for France was much higher than the US (according to the OECD data in your chart above). I know that French unemployment has historically been higher, at least according to the ILO: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?locations=FR-US. And I checked labor force participation, which for France also looked quite low (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS?locations=FR-US). So it does seem to me like a bit of a mystery that OECD's reports of the French prime age employment-population ratio seem so high...

Of course, these ILO metrics don't filter down to prime age population. But I feel like the gap between the ILO estimates (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.TOTL.SP.ZS?locations=FR-US-DE-JP), and the prime age metrics reported by OECD (per your graph) is quite large to just be explained by filtering down to that subpopulation.

I might be wrong here, but curious if you might have any other thoughts on the data on France?

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