Global crisis: unemployment rate in United States at its highest level in decades

Yesterday was released the data for unemployment for the United States. It has been the highest in more than 20 years: 9.5%. Besides the concerns on the current situation other concern is to what extent employment will recover as soon as the economy recovers. In the country there have been two periods of “jobless recovery”, i.e., periods when the economy grew and the employment did not grew, at least for 5 or 6 quarters. In the following chart we can see this phenomena after the recessions in 1991-93 and 2001-03. Researchers have concluded that productivity gains are responsible for this phenomenon (Gordon 1993). Groshen and Potter (2003) also present evidence that the lack of growth in employment could be explained because many industries experienced “structural changes”.