Re: more Western
On Sep 9, 2007, at 10:33 PM, Nick C. Woomer-Deters wrote:
According to Western’s figures, in 1995 U.S. unemployment adjusted to include all inmates exceeded the similarly adjusted unemployment rates of Austria, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland.
Those are male unemployment rates only. And that rate - which
Western and Beckett call u2 - assumes that all the incarcerated would
be unemployed - but as the authors say, only 36% of inmates were
unemployed at the time of their arrest. If you apply that result to
the population behind bars, which they call the u1 rate, then the
results are a lot less dramatic: only the Netherlands moves below the
U.S.
Here’s a table. The column labeled “all” is the OECD’s standardized
unemployment rate for 1995. The next three columns come from the
Western/Beckett paper: the male unemployment rate, and their u1 and
u2 rates. The last column shows the difference between the u1 rate
and the male rate. This narrows the difference somewhat, but it
really doesn’t change the picture of the U.S. having a lower
unemployment rate than the larger EU countries, or the euroland average.
all male u1 u2 u1-male
Australia 8.2 Austria 3.9 3.3 3.3 3.5 0.0 Belgium 9.7 9.1 9.2 9.4 0.1 Canada 9.5 Denmark 6.8 6.2 6.3 6.4 0.1 EU-15 10.0 euroland 10.4 Finland 15.1 17.7 17.8 17.9 0.1 France 11.1 10.1 10.2 10.4 0.1 Germany 8.0 7.1 7.2 7.4 0.1 Ireland 12.3 12.3 12.3 12.5 0.0 Italy 11.2 9.5 9.6 9.8 0.1 Japan 3.1 Korea 2.1 N Zealand 6.3 Neth 6.6 5.9 6.0 6.1 0.1 Norway 5.4 5.3 5.3 5.5 0.0 Spain 18.4 Sweden 8.8 8.4 8.5 8.7 0.1 Switz 3.5 2.7 2.8 2.9 0.1 UK 8.5 10.1 10.2 10.4 0.1 US 5.6 5.6 6.2 7.5 0.6