April 9, 2005
PEERS?:
Greece rethinks Eurofighter (News 24, 09/04/2005)
Greece is reconsidering a project by the former Socialist government to buy 60 Eurofighter jets for its air force, the defence ministry said here on Saturday.As both the Greek prime minister and defence minister are due to visit the United States in the coming weeks the press here is speculating the government may choose the US F-16 instead.
Unemployment at 6.5m, not 5.2m: jobs chief (Expatica, 8 April 2005)
The German government on Friday struggled to contain fallout after a damaging admission by the Federal Labour Office chief that the country's real jobless rate is far higher than official figures show.Posted by Orrin Judd at April 9, 2005 11:46 PM"I didn't have the courage to change the well-rehearsed ritual and name the 6.5 million figure," said Frank-Juergen Weise, head of the Federal Labour Office, according to media reports.
Germany's official jobless rate is 5.2 million, or 12.5 percent. The 'ritual', which Weise mentioned, is his monthly press conference at the Office's headquarters in Nuremberg to present official jobs data.
Weise's higher figure of 6.5 million unemployed takes into account those
on state make-work projects and people who have simply stopped looking for work and are not counted in government statistics.
why would greece or any other eurolabia country buy any fighter aircraft ? under what conceivable scenario would they use them ?
Posted by: cjm at April 10, 2005 1:08 AM"Weise's higher figure of 6.5 million unemployed takes into account those
on state make-work projects and people who have simply stopped looking for work and are not counted in government statistics."
I may be mistaken, but aren't those no longer looking for work not counted in the US unemployment rate either?
Posted by: creeper at April 10, 2005 1:42 AMIt's a bad sentence that doesn't make clear what it is trying to say. The unemployment figure is the percent of the workforce that is out of work. It does not include people who have given up looking for work, although that is somewhat oversimplified. However, in the US there are "government statistics" that track discouraged workers, as well as total employment.
Posted by: David Cohen at April 10, 2005 2:03 AMCreeper: that's true of the U.S. as well but the difference is less. The current Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (www.bls.gov) puts the number of unemployed at 7.7 million and the number of 'marginally attached' workers at 1.6 million for a total of 9.3 million, or about 6.6% of a workforce of 140.5 million. That's about half Germany's official unemployment rate before you even add in the additional 1.3 million underemployed. With those added in the actual German unemployment rate is 15.6%, not 12.5%. The picture gets even more brutal when you start looking at long-term unemployment. That gibes with the lower ratio of discouraged-to-unemployed here (1.6M/7.7M = 21%) vs. there (1.3M / 5.2M = 25%)
Posted by: joe shropshire at April 10, 2005 2:45 AMThe Belgravia Dispatch had some pertinent comments on this topic.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at April 10, 2005 4:06 AMThe Greeks are fortunate to have this flexibility, for which they will be envied by other European air forces. My dad (ex-officer, Royal Air Force) coincidentally told me over the weekend that the RAF has been stuck with the Eurofighter by the government. They would desperately like to get rid of it, because of its huge cost and its low relevance to any (other than symbolic) mission they are ever likely to take on.
Posted by: ZF at April 10, 2005 8:00 PMGuess it's not called the Eurofighter for nothing.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at April 11, 2005 3:05 AM