Unemployment numbers - are they determined the same from country to country

[goddess40]

I ask because I caught a part of F911 yesterday where Moore is in Canada trying to figure out why their crime rate is lower and the Canadian official was saying that their unemployment rate was slightly higher than the States.

I know it's unlikely but that clip of the movie made me think about how hard it is to determine what are real rates of unemployment are and that Canada probably has a much better/honest way of determining their rate of unemployment.

[daa]

1. No

The US counts about 1/2 to 2/3 compared to Europe.

[mcscajun]

2. Each government is free to have its economists determine its own numbers

Goodness knows our Current Occupant has been busy manipulating them and other numbers (like the money supply) for quite some time.

Once upon a time, I posted this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1249059&mesg_id=1249488

The latest numbers will certainly have changed, but the principles of distortion remain the same.

I'd like to believe Canada's are more accurate, but I dunno. :shrug:

[goddess40]

3. Thanks for the link to your post

We've always screwed with these numbers and no one seems to be in a hurry to make sure they are remotely accurate.

[Elwood P Dowd]

4. The Dept Of Labor creates "make believe" jobs

with a new trick called the Death-Birth Model, or something like that. A few months ago they used this model to announce 300,000 make believe jobs were created. In reality, there was negative job creation that month. This mysterious new trick allowed them to claim otherwise. They have been doing this for about five years.

[BearSquirrel2]

5. Republicans ALWAYS post the best results ...

Republicans ALWAYS measure up better since they consider the ruler to be a bit more flexible then a Democrat. How about Reagan's nice trick of throwing in the military to unemployment numbers? What about the way they counted the 83' FICA tax increases in their revenues to "prove" the laffer curve.

Yeah, the numbers from the Bush administration are meaningless. We'll be well into recession next year and Bush's ginned up numbers will still show that this is the strongest economy ever.

BTW, folks don't forget that as soon as you go off of unemployment, you're no longer considered to be "looking for work" and you don't count anymore. Whatever happened to taking the number of workers who are paying FICA dividing that by the total population and subtracting that from 100%?