Unemployment remains high, and a shocking 1.5m Poles of working age are not economically active.
Of 777, 000 Scots aged between 17 and 64 deemed economically active in the year to June, 176, 000 were students.
Of this economically active population, there is a high number of informal workers.
They envisage a world in which working people remain economically active until later in life as both earners and customers.
Nonetheless, the lengthy, costly and mandatory procedures necessary to start a business have not stopped 22.7% of the economically active population of becoming entrepreneurs.
It is impossible to be exact, but suppose that the same proportion of men aged between 25 and 50 was economically active now as in 1990.
Partly due to a less generous welfare state, American immigrant workers with lower educations have, for the most part, been more economically active than their nonimmigrant counterparts.
On the current, rather relaxed timetable for building the register (a pace forced by cabinet sceptics), it will capture about 80% of the economically active population by 2013.
Just 48% of British Muslims reported that they were economically active in 2001, compared with 65% of Christians, 67% of Hindus and 75% of those who professed no religion.
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Of more than three million students, 2.2 million are not economically active, and 2.3 million people are not in the labour market because they're looking after family or the home.
Silicon Valley is now the world's most economically active place (surpassing a rueful Asia in mid-'97), and international flights into San Francisco and San Jose, the valley's "capital, " dump foreign deal-makers at record levels.
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This happens when there are relatively few children (because of the fall in fertility), relatively few older people (because of higher mortality previously), and lots of economically active adults, including, often, many women, who enter the labour force in large numbers for the first time.
Such initiatives, she says, are aimed at building a positive image in areas where Beijing is economically and politically active.
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