According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, employment levels in the OECD are still below their levels before the financial crisis hit in 2008.
The OECD area employment rate – defined as the proportion of people of working age who have a job – was 64.9% in the fourth quarter of 2011, which it says is 1.6 percentage points lower than before the start of the global financial crisis.
There were 528 million people employed in the OECD area in the fourth quarter of 2011, it says, which is 2 million below the level observed at the onset of the crisis. Moreover, during the same period the working age population increased by 17 million, and the unemployed increased by 13 million, and those not employed nor looking for employment increased by 6 million.
Since the start of the crisis, there have been large disparities in the evolution of employment rates, the OECD reports. It says that, since the second quarter of 2008, the employment rate has declined by around two percentage points in the European Union and Canada, by more than four percentage points in the United states, and by eight percentage points or more in Greece, Ireland and Spain. Only in Chile, Germany and Turkey is the employment rate significantly higher today than at the onset of the crisis.
In virtually all OECD countries, the job crisis is affecting men more severely than women, and young people (aged 15 to 24) more than prime age workers (those aged 25 to 54), it notes.