America’s latest jobs report was both encouraging and sobering. The world’s largest economy added 943,000 jobs in July, but employment rates will not catch up with its pre-crisis level until early 2022
AMERICA’S LATEST jobs report was both encouraging and sobering. The world’s largest economy added 943,000 jobs in July. That is the best tally in nearly a year—but even at this pace employment will not catch up with its pre-crisis level until early 2022, six months after output regained its peak. Jobs in the rest of the rich world, too, are likely to take a while to return to pre-pandemic highs.
What explains the gap? One potential explanation is that there is too little demand for labour. A rough measure of the overall need for workers involves adding the total number of people already employed to the number of unfilled vacancies . Even in America, the country experiencing the strongest economic recovery, this gauge is still 3% below its pre-crisis level, despite record-high vacancies.
Yet it seems unlikely that governments can close the worker deficit simply by spending more. Compare America and the EU. In the spring of 2020 aggregate working hours in both economies tanked. America then passed gargantuan stimulus packages, while European governments chose more modest measures. The recovery in working hours since then has been only marginally better in America—not much extra labour for a lot of extra cash.
Take disruption first. It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
Lower labour supply might also reflect the impact of welfare policies such as handouts and pensions—our second category of reasons. Frothy stockmarkets may have boosted the value of some pension pots, prompting people to start their golf-club membership earlier than expected. That seems to have been the case in America: recent research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, finds that “excess retirees” account for about a quarter of the decline in the country’s participation rate.
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