German Unemployment Remains At 11.8%

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Despite the recent surge in German GDP and export growth, and the ongoing structural reforms, German unemployment remains stubbornly high.

German unemployment was unchanged in May at close to a post-World War II high, dealing a blow to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s chances of re-election.

The jobless rate, adjusted for seasonal swings, held at 11.8 percent, close to the postwar record of 12 percent recorded in March, the Nuremberg-based Federal Labor Agency said today. That was in line with the median of 31 forecasts by economists in a Bloomberg survey.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

One thought on “German Unemployment Remains At 11.8%”

  1. The gist is right, but what the “real” numbers are, no one knows. Statistical changes have made those numbers a weapon in politics. But they are hardly a real source of information anymore.

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