How can a person calculate the unemployment rate of a place?

Unemployment can be calculated as a number (of people not working and looking for work) OR as a percentage of the total population of working age.

However defining unemployment is difficult. To be unemployed a person must be not working BUT must be looking for work and available to work. There are many people who are not working who cannot be considered to be unemployed because they are not actively seeking work. These people are defined as being out of the labour force.

Within the UK unemployment is calculated in two separate ways. The first is using the %26quot;claimant count%26quot;. This is calculated monthly by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and is simply the number of people claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA). However, in recent years, this measure has been argued to drastically understate the actual number of unemployed people in the economy. For example, many people are financially affluent and when out of work would not feel the need to claim the low rate of Job Seekers Allowance. Equally, some feel that pride is an issue when claiming JSA.

In consideration of this problem, the Government has moved to a new measure called the Labour Force Survey. This is an independependently calculated figure by the International Labour Organisation. It is derived from a telephone survey of 100 000 people (60 000 households). For a person to be included as unemployed in this survey they must have been actively seeking work in the last 4 weeks and must be available to start work immediately. The survey only includes people over and above the age of 16. It is also notewrthy that the ILO measure is used by a number of other countries making international comparisons of levels of unemployment much easier.

If one looks at the data comparing these two measures of unemployment one discovers that the Labour Force Survey is consistently higher than the Claimant Count by give or take 1/2 a million people.

It must also be remembered that there are many different types of unemployment - not all of these are bad.

Cyclical unemployment occurs during the recessionary period of the economic cycle and is due to a lack of aggregate demand. This is also known as Keynesian unemployment.

Seasonal unemployment takes place in many industries such as retail and leisure due to seasonal changes in the patterns of demand for goods and services.

Technological unemployment takes places as a result of capital-labour substitution (this is when machines replace the jobs of humans).

Structural unemployment occurs when there is a mismatch between skills / qualifications of workers and the actual jobs available. This is often associated with a lack of occupational mobility of the factor labour.

Frictional unemployment is when people are between jobs or are between school / university and taking up a position. A further example is when mothers decide to return to work and are actively seeking work.

Finally, hidden unemployment is the term given to all those unemployed people who are not recorded in the official statistics.

A survey a couple of years ago by economists at the HSBC measured the number of people who are %26quot;economically inactive%26quot;. Taking this as a definition of unemployment led to the calculated figure for unemployed people in the UK rising to around 4 milion (this is four times the offical statistics).

To conclude then, unemployment can be calculated a number of ways including: adding all those claiming JSA; surveying all those actively seeking work; or simply working out the number of %26quot;economically inactive%26quot; individuals. Each one of these methods relies on a different definition of what unemployment actually is.

How can a person calculate the unemployment rate of a place?credit union

you can%26#039;t the FEDS are juggling the numbers to make it look better

How can a person calculate the unemployment rate of a place? loan

Ask everyone who lives there if they have a job or not, then divide the haves%26#039; by 100 and multiply by the have-nots%26#039; the answer = % of total pop that are jobless. I would suggest that you

divide the don%26#039;t knows%26#039; and punch on the noses between the two answers.|||I%26#039;d take the number of people within the local working age group (say 15-60) as the denominator. Divide the number of these people who are jobless by the denominator.|||The actual definition of unemployment is people who are actively seeking work. Thus, there can be jobless people (and want work) who are not considered unemployed.

You take the unemployed number and divide it by the number of the people in the workforce.