Thursday, July 25, 2013

Employment Population Ratio 15-64 for OECD and BRICS countries

We have retrieved the employment participation rate from the OECD site and plotted the following five graphs:

  • Ranking of countries (all OECD countries with more than 5 million population plus BRICS) by total employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
  • Ranking of countries by male employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
  • Ranking of countries by female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
  • Ranking of countries by difference of male to female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
  • Change of employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) between 2011 and 2001 (data for India is not available)
Large (more than 50 million population) OECD countries are colored green, medium (5 to 50 million population) blue and BRICS countries red. Countries are shown with their two digit ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.







































Top 3: Switzerland, China, Netherlands
Bottom 3: South Africa, Turkey, India







































Top 3: Switzerland, China, Japan
Bottom 3: South Africa, Hungary, Spain







































Top 3: Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark
Bottom 3: Turkey, India, South Africa







































Top 3: Finland, Sweden, Denmark
Bottom 3: India, Turkey, Mexico







































Top 3: Chile, Germany, Poland
Bottom 3: US, Portugal, China

Surprises:
  • Switzerland with highest employment to population to population ratios by a wide margin also for females
  • Hardly any change in terms of employment to population ratio in Greece or Spain during the last ten years
From Chile´s perspective it is nice to see big improvement in the last ten year, but still much to be done with current ranked in the third quartile in terms of male employment and bottom quartile regarding female employment.

Finally a word of caution: employment data is normally survey based and significant differences with other data sources (say social security) are likely.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Business English

Following a blog post in the Economist, I stumbled across another post from the same publication and finally came across an EF publication which compares English proficiency across many countries. Results are in line with expectation with Scandinavia ranked very high (including the Dutch as honorary Scandinavians) and Central Eastern Europe as high (including also Singapore and Malaysia). Chile is not doing very well, I must say, with very low English proficiency (ranked 39 out of 54).