Are one in four young French people really unemployed?
This is an interesting article from the Independent that explores how France’s youth unemployment figure could be read to be twice the size of the UK’s or almost the same depending on which set of data is used.
There are two ways of measuring youth unemployment: the youth unemployment rate and the youth unemployment ratio. It is the youth unemployment rate that is used to produce the “twice the levels of the UK and Germany” headline created by the Financial Times.
The Independent sourced data from Eurostat which reported that the youth unemployment rate in 2016 was indeed 24.6 per cent, or around one in four. Double the UK rate of 13 per cent.
But the EU statistics agency also reports that the French youth unemployment ratio in that year was just 9.1 per cent, not so dramatically different from the UK ratio of 7.6 per cent.
So, depending on which metric used, the French youth joblessness situation is either twice as bad as the UK’s, or roughly the same.
I have often argued that the way youth unemployment data is presented in the UK can be confusing and therefor misleading. Our 2016 APPG Inquiry looked at this issue in more detail. It seems that the UK is not the only Country to face this challenge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/infact/france-youth-unemployment-oecd-a7752816.html
