The unemployment rate doesn’t measure the percentage of people of a given age – in this case 15-24 – who want a job and can’t get one. It measures those people as a percentage of the labour force – people either in employment or searching for a job – and ignores all those in education or training.
In Spain that’s quite a big difference: recession or no, a lot of Spaniards go to college and often take a long time to get round to graduating. A better measure of the failure to create jobs is the percentage of young people aged 15-24 who are not in employment, education or training (NEETS). The OECD have given me the chart below. Spain is towards the top, but only a few percentage points above the EU average and actually below the OECD average (a relatively large number of women don’t enter the labour force in countries like Turkey). Greece shows a similar pattern.
via Half of young Spaniards are not on the dole | The World.
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