Australia has always been a country I have followed with interest. I had Australian teachers in grade school who were among my favorites and my primary school principal was a kind and wise Australian from Tasmania. I also have some distant cousins in Australia. So I am pleased to see that despite suffering an initial slowdown after the crash and being vulnerable to a slowdown in the Chinese economy Australia is doing significantly better when it comes to unemployment. 
These rates are reported in today’s Melbourne Age and they suggest an economy thats doing much better than either western Europe with the exception of Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and also better than Canada or the U.S. Part of the explanation is undoubtedly due to the proximity to Asia but there may well be other policy aspects involved which ought to be studied. The chart below courtesy of the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows unemployment performance since February 2002 which shows that even after the crash and global spike in unemployment the rate peaked for males at just over 6 % and for females at about 5.5 %. from their previous lows of around 4 % for men and 4.5% for women in 2008. So despite the rise in unemployment and the shock of the crash and also the rise in underemployment, the broader measure of underutilization of labour including headline unemployment is about 12 %, Australia seems to have recovered better than many other countries in the G20
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: TREND SERIES
Males and females
UNDERUTILISED LABOUR: TREND SERIES
Labour force underutilisation rates
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About haroldchorneyeconomist
I am Professor of political economy at Concordia university in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I received my B.A.Hons (econ.&poli sci) from the University of Manitoba. I also completed my M.A. degree in economics there. Went on to spend two years at the London School of Economics as a Ph.D. student in economics and then completed my Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Toronto. Was named a John W.Dafoe fellow, a CMHC fellow and a Canada Council fellow. I also was named a Woodrow Wilson fellow in 1968 after completing my first class honours undergraduate degree. Worked as an economist in the area of education, labour economics and as the senior economist with the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corporation for the Government of Manitoba from 1972 to 1978. I also have worked as an economic consultant for MDT socio-economic consultants and have been consulted on urban planning, health policy, linguistic duality and public sector finance questions by the governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan,the cities of Regina and Saskatoon, Ontario and the Federal government of Canada. I have also been consulted by senior leaders of the British Labour party, MPs from the Progressive Conservative party, the Liberal party and the New Democrats on economic policy questions. Members of the Government of France under the Presidency of Francois Mitterand discussed my work on public sector deficits. I have also run for elected office at the municipal level. I first began to write about quantitative easing as a useful policy option during the early 1980s.
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