In her editorial for this Friday, February 4, Agnès Verdier-Molinié, director of the IFRAP foundation, looks at the unemployment figures.
Unemployment has reached 7% of the active population in Europe, Eurostat tells us, the lowest since April 1998. In France, this rate has reached 7.4%, according to harmonized Eurostat data. Some countries are even at full employment: Czech Republic (2.1%), Poland (2.9%) and Germany (3.2%).
Is France at full employment?
We are still far from it! It is very difficult to get an idea of the true number of job seekers in France. There is in fact a difference of one million job seekers between category A (unemployed job seekers) from Pôle Emploi and the INSEE figures: 3.1 million versus 2.2 million unemployed.
Both by Unemployment Insurance and by the State, it is 3 million in the 3rd quarter of 2021.
Some are not required to look for a job because they are in training (347,800 people – cat D in the 4th quarter of 2021) but this still gives a significant indication: we are far from the 2.25 million who make the 7, 4% calculated by Eurostat.
To assess the number of unemployed, INSEE does not rely on data from Pôle Emploi but conducts a survey of 110,000 people. Only those counted among the unemployed are those who answer “yes” to the following question: “Have you actively sought work over the past four weeks and are you available to work in the next two weeks? “. This definition of unemployment as defined by the International Labor Office (ILO) is the same all over the world.
By definition, therefore, those who are on long-term partial unemployment, those who are in training, those who are in subsidized jobs, all those who are, for one reason or another, not available to work within two weeks will not be not counted and fall into what is called the halo of unemployment.
In France, this famous “halo of unemployment” is, according to the latest figures from INSEE, 2 million people of working age, wishing to work, but who are not counted as unemployed for all that. This figure jumped with the crisis, France traditionally having rather a halo of unemployment around 1.5 million people.
Still according to INSEE and Dares, in a publication dated 2019, we can clearly see that in 2017, if we add unemployment, underemployment and the halo of unemployment, we arrive in France at around 17% and in Germany around 9%, i.e. almost half as much. Two years later, in 2019, if we just added unemployment and the halo of unemployment in France, we were at 13.5%. In Germany it was 7.2 and in the Netherlands 9%.
Far from full employment…
Indeed, if we count job seekers, inactive people who are no longer looking for work and people who work but would like to work more (underemployment), we include nearly 6 million people and we triples the number of official job seekers.