January 04, 2012
The New York Times misled readers today by telling them that Germany’s unemployment rate is 6.8 percent. This number is the official German measure of unemployment. It is not directly comparable to the U.S. measure of unemployment primarily because it counts people who are working part-time, but would like full-time jobs, as being unemployed.
There is no excuse for presenting this measure without clarifying the difference with the U.S. measure of unemployment. It is actually simple to get a measure that is comparable to the U.S. measure since the OECD publishes a harmonized unemployment rate series that uses a similar methodology to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This measure shows that Germany’s unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in October, more than a full percentage below the number reported by the NYT.
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