The writer, in his other life as an olive grower, currently finds himself in the novel (and at first nerve racking) position of having to organize and work with an almost entirely new team of pickers - only one of which he had known previously. The culprit behind this was the government decree published on July 22nd that reversed the two year-old decision that had given Romanians full EU rights in Spain. Seeing as this legislation was specifically created to give a statistical boost to the paralysed PSOE cartel that governs an equally paralytic Andalusian economy in the runup to March elections, we'll avail ourselves of the opportunity to talk about the miserable Spanish unemployment situation.
On the social strife front, it's worth noting that work stoppages protesting government policies have almost all been on the part of functionaries - specifically medical personnel, school teachers and prison guards. These people are the 'haves', not the 'have-nots' - who are shown in the green and yellow lines on the left.
Muddying the economic issue considerably is the fact that two of these three groups have, and avail themselves of, full recourse to the 'societal benefit' argument behind which to conceal whatever portion of their complaint is purely the protection of their own interests.
A rather curious defence of this apparent unwillingness of some government employees to even consider the possibility that they might have to make a sacrifice comes from the next chart. The age group assigned the colour red will not be well represented in the ranks of the placard bearers, but many of those who are - especially the blues and the purples - will be the parents of that lot and are providing them with financial support.
This does nothing to justify the apparent fact that the entire system is upside down. The 25 to 34 year-olds should be contributing to the soon to be tapped pension plans of that swelling group approaching retirement - not the opposite.
As an interesting aside, the graph on the left shows the progress of unemployment rates as a percentage of recent up cycle minima for various countries. Two things, to us, stand out.
First would be that the Spanish 23 percent UR is worse, but not overwhelmingly so, than the American 10 percent if one considers that 2007 or 2008 figures represented full employment for both countries and then measures the unemployment rate with respect to those years. There's a comment here on the assumed cross-cultural portability of statistical series.
Secondly, the bars at the bottom right of the chart - representing the same calculation for Germany, France and Italy - seriously cast doubts on the long term benefits of economic cycles driven by uncontrolled real estate prices. The latter three countries did not undergo property bubbles. The first two did.
----------------------------
0 Comments:
Post a Comment