Not only is the unemployment rate stuck several percentage points above where it should be, but the percentage of the labor force and the population has also declined by several percentage points.
Now, I can understand that there are going to be limits to labor force participation within a population and that not everyone in a society is going to be physically or mentally able to work, but still, if there are no jobs and no work, what are people doing?
In addition, the US labor force has flattened out as female labor force participation has stopped rising and the population ages.
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The red line is the percentage of the working-age population in the labor force.
As such, the percentage of the population participating in the labor force declined from 65.7 to 63.8.
The bottom line: A large population, a large labor force, and a dose of markets may be the necessary condition for leading the global economy.
One bright spot in the Labor Department jobs release, at least, was the slight rise in both the labor force participation rate and employment-to-population ratio, the first increases since February.
The main conclusion from this demographic work is that, barring a new increase in female labor force participation or a significant increase in the growth rate of the population, these demographic factors point towards a further decline in trend growth of employment and hours in the coming decades.
Moreover, the labor force participation rate, which is a measure of the percentage of people working in the entire population, is falling precipitously.
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Given that people who move to Russia tend to be of working age, the working age population has stabilized in contrast to earlier expectations of a rapid contraction in the labor force.
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The labor force participation rate of recent immigrants is reported as high as 94 percent, about one third higher than the general population.
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The labor-force participation rate, which measures those employed as well as those looking for work as a portion of the population, fell 0.2 to a seasonally adjusted 63.3%, a level last seen in mid-1979.
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