California Business Minute™

Hi, I am Tim Johnson and welcome to the California Business Minute.

The Website, 24/7 Wall St. looked at unemployment data for every nation with a
population of two million or more.  They have released a list of the ‘Top 15
Nations with the Highest Unemployment.’

The first obvious observation from reviewing the list is that most of the nations
with high unemployment rates have fairly young governments. They were, usually,
either colonies of larger countries or provinces of existing nations that have
gained independence. The other observation, is that many specifically recently
were war-torn and war-torn nations tend to have high unemployment rates, almost
certainly because people are uprooted and infrastructure is upended as a result
of the violence.

Top 15 Nations with Highest Unemployment

1 Macedonia                           33.8%
2 Armenia                               28.6%
3 Algeria                                 27.3%
4 West Bank/Gaza Strip          25.7%
5 Bosnia/Herzegovina              23.4%
6 South Africa                         22.9%
7 Namibia                               22   %
8 Columbia                             20.5%
9 Botswana                            17.6%
10 Iraq                                   17.5%
11 Georgia                             16.5%
12 Yemen                              16.1%
13 Croatia                              14.8%
14 Tunisia                              14.2%
15. Burundi                            14   %

The methodology that 24/7 Wall St. used to evaluate and define total unemployment
includes: (1) identifying the 15 countries with the highest unemployment rates
based on data collected by the United Nation’s Yearbook of Labor Statistics,
considered to be the best resource for nationally reported statistics; (2) evaluating
the total number of people over 14 who are unemployed in each of these countries,
based on the International Labour Office’s Key Indicators of the Labor Market program,
a United Nations program considered to be more accurate and comprehensive than the
nationally reported data; (3) comparing these numbers to other sources, including
the U.S. State Department, the IMF, the CIA Fact Book, and Organization of Economic
Co-operation; and (4) employing the United Nation’s International Labor Organization’s
databases – the Yearbook and KILM – which provide the most consistent and complete
set of data across the largest number of countries.

However, in reviewing similar sources, we compared California as one of the top ten
largest economies in the world against others in the top ten here are the results
from the are supported by the CIA World Fact Book and the International Monetary Fund

UNEMPLOYMENT RATES OF THE TOP TEN WORLD ECONOMIES
USA                                 9.9% April 2010
China                                4.3% End of 2009
Germany                           7.1% April 2010
Japan                                5.1% April 2010
France                            10.1% April 2010
Great Britain                      7.9% April 2010
Russia                              9.9% May 2009
Brazil                                7.3% April 2010
Italy                                   8.9% April 2010
Spain                               19.7% April 2010

California  12.6% April 2010

Of interest, Great Britain unemployment of 2.5 million exceeds the number of unemployed
in California even though they have a smaller unemployment rate. And while recent
forecasts illustrate a tepid recovery, the US and California economies are expected
to grow at a much faster GDP than those of Great Britain, France and Italy,
suggesting that California maybe in a better position than other global economies.

I am Tim Johnson and this has been the California Business Minute.