UK Unemployment And The G7: It Could Be Worse

The jobless rate in the U.K. has been falling consistently since a peak in 2011, reaching 7.2 percent this month. It’s still a far cry from the 5 percent unemployment the country had before the global financial crisis hit in 2008, but it has come down significantly since the 8.1 percent in August 2011, which was the nation’s highest in 17 years at that point.

The jobless rate in the U.K. has been falling consistently since a peak in 2011, reaching 7.2 percent this month. It’s still a far cry from the 5 percent unemployment the country had before the global financial crisis hit in 2008, but it has come down significantly since the 8.1 percent in August 2011, which was the nation’s highest in 17 years at that point.

Unemployment rates are falling across the nations that make up the G7. Across the pond, American job seekers are doing better than their UK counterparts: according to Randstad, unemployment was down in 43 of the 50 states in 2013 compared to 2012, and only two states had higher unemployment. North Dakota has cut down its unemployment to just 2.9 percent. Participation rates, i.e., the percentage of people in the workforce, held at 6.3 percent, which is still the nation’s lowest since the 1970s. And the national unemployment rate as of February is 6.7 percent, or a tenth of a percent higher than January—despite the economy actually creating 175,000 new jobs. Most of the gains happened in professional and business services.

Canada had a little “sputter” in February, shedding a net of 7,000 jobs after a good January, but that was not big enough to alter its 7 percent rate. There, job losses occurred to a large part in the public sector, but the services sector, particularly finance, insurance, real estate, and leasing, also saw big losses, unlike the U.S.

The G7’s most successful member, or at least the most employed, is Japan: at 3.7 percent in January, unchanged from the month prior, it’s the lowest unemployment rate since December 2007. Jobs were added across industries in January, with the bulk coming on in retail, wholesale, lodging, and food industries.

Back on the continent, Europe’s largest economy is turning out to be quite the success story this year: Germany’s jobless rate has dropped to 6.8 percent—the lowest since the reunification more than two decades ago, according to Reuters. Germany’s effective unemployment rate actually fell to just 5 percent, the second lowest among EU states after Austria.

Things are drastically different for the other two G7 Europeans: Italy’s unemployment rate jumped somewhat unexpectedly from 12.7 percent in December to 12.9 percent in January, according to the latest figures (some parts are even harder hit: Sardinia, for example, has 18.1 percent unemployment). France, too, saw record numbers of jobseekers in January, the unemployed rate rising to 11 percent of the workforce, according to the Financial Times—and that doesn’t include people with part-time work seeking full-time positions. France and Italy are right on the nose as far as the European Union-wide unemployment average of around 12 percent.

Related: Global Unemployment Rise Despite Mild Economic Recovery: UN

There is some indication that UK’s unemployment is going to continue to fall. According to a recent poll of over 50 economists published in Reuters, as long as the Bank of England doesn’t raise interest rates until 2015, Britain’s economy is expected to grow 2.7 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2015 and 2016, while the Eurozone is expected to grow just 1.1 percent this year and 1.4 percent in the following two.

On the other hand, this doesn’t mean UK jobseekers should shun the continent, particularly if they have a higher degree: a recent study published in The Guardian found that 22 percent of UK jobs demand only a primary education, compared to 5 percent in fellow G7 member Germany.