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Unemployment is down across the world’s largest economies

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This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: Charlotte Edmond, Formative Content

The number of employed people in the world’s largest economies is on the rise, as workers enjoy an increasingly healthy job market.

Statistics from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, which measures the number of people out of work as a proportion of the overall labour force, shows a dip in unemployment levels across most major economies.

The jobless number fell to a 50-year low in the United States earlier this year, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rates are currently hovering around levels not seen since 1969, and are down significantly on the post-recession unemployment high of 10% in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Both Japan and Germany have seen unemployment dip to levels even below the US.

Alongside falling jobless rates, Japan has also seen a hike in the number of positions available as domestic and overseas demand feeds the buoyant job market. However, the country is suffering from the effects of an ageing working population, with dwindling numbers of people available to fill those roles.

The number of people out of work in Germany meanwhile is sitting around historically low levels, not seen since the country’s reunification three decades ago.

European neighbours France and Italy still have relatively high levels of joblessness, although there has still been a marked decline in recent years.

But it is Brazil that is the main outlier among the major economies, being the only country among the top 10 – with the exclusion of India for which insufficient data was available – to see unemployment levels rise since 2014. The volume of people without a job jumped from an already high base to 11.4% of the population – a record level for the country.

Although a fast-growing economy had seen unemployment fall dramatically, sluggish recovery from a significant recession between 2015 and 2016 has hit employment in Brazil hard. Wages have remained stagnant, as slack in the job market has kept a lid on growth.