I actually took a look at this data and collected all the information several months ago but then I kind of lost track of it. Probably due to that the report season started for quarter three. Anyway now I start to be back on track again so I then decided to make an article concerning it.
The starting point was that I found it strange that the unemployment level is so low in Germany (around 5%) but at the same time I see so many people, probably especially here in Berlin, that unfortunately are forced to live on social welfare.
Coming from Sweden, world famous for its social welfare system, I decided to look at how is it really. To my astonishment I found that Sweden have an unemployment rate of around 8% which is very high but on the other hand the amount of people on social welfare was around 4% if I remember correctly so I then got that to around 12% of the work able population are not working in Sweden.
When I then looked at Germany then yes the unemployment level is down at 5% but the amount of people living on social welfare was around 8.5% which then gave that around 13.5% of the work able population in Germany was not working.
So this was the start. To find information concerning all this is a jungle to say the least. Each country apply their own rules for which age is supposed to be part of the workforce and all of them are trying to hide under the rug how many people are living on social welfare.
I therefore decided to make life easier for myself and I decided to look at how large is the population and from this population how many %-age are working.
Oh, and the data is compiled from Wikipedia and Eurostat.
Below is the graph showing the %-age of workers from the total population of each country. What we can see is that the ones to the left are today considered to be better performing countries and the ones to the right not, with the odd exception of Turkey, which can maybe come from that fewer women are working.
I decided to include how many people are employed by the government in each country as can be seen in the graph below. All the Nordic countries seem to have a hefty bureaucracy especially since few of them have a large military force which, of course, is included in this figure. What is of large influence here is the level of privatization that the countries have made and unfortunately I have not managed to compile any data concerning that.
In the below graph I removed the government employees from the total workforce in each country and for whatever reason we end up with the, mainly German speaking, countries in the top. The more people working, the more taxes are coming in. I am also fascinated that Romania is so high up.
Now comes what I find the most interesting of it all and in many ways it is scary to look at this graph since it shows us the amount of people in the country that does not generate money. Meaning that all the unemployed are out, all the people being paid by the government so the governmental employees, the people living on social welfare, the people living on retirement money, all the children and the students are of course also not included. Simply put and very generalized... all the people living on the government tit one way or the other.
Does anyone still wonder why Greece, France, Spain and Italy are not doing so well?
What I do wonder however is why is Portugal not doing much better? And I also think I need to take a closer look at Romania.
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