Question

4. Why is it so difficult to define full employment? What unemployment rate should the government be shooting for today? During the pandemic.

Answer 1

Why is it so difficult to define full employment?

• The Government and economists try to define full employment by various metrics, but it is very hard to completely measure employment upon hundreds of millions of people. Therefore, they each use tools to make estimates.
• Full employement means , That everyone who wants a Job has a Job . But in National economy , Some unemployement is expected , and even necessary ; So , Full employement is often define more broadly as the highest resonable expection of employement as a whole .
• The Department of Labor also defines an unemployed person: All persons who have no employment, are available for work (excluding temporary illness), and have made specific efforts to find employment during the four weeks leading up to when the measurement was taken.

Unemployment rate should the government be shooting for today :

• Now-a-days , Unemployement shot up largely in India . Unemployment in India shot up in August, largely on the back of loss of work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and end of sowing of the Kharif crop leading to greater jump in unemployment in rural India. This is a reversal in trend since April when more jobs were created in the hinterland .
• This has halted the overall employment rate in the country in August which fell marginally to 37.5% compared to 37.6% in July while significantly pushing up the unemployment rate at 8.4%, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy said.
• The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as many businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to try to limit the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
• The national lockdown may have led to significant job losses across the country, with the overall unemployment rate hitting over 23% in the last week of March 2020, according to estimates put out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).