On Tuesday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) released the harmonized unemployment rates
for December 2011, showing an unemployment rate across the OECD
area of 8.2%; the same rate as the previous month. Similarly,
the rate within the Euro area also remained unchanged at 10.4%,
marking a continued high since the start of the economic crisis
in 2008. These averages mask a great deal of cross-national
variation, however, with some countries having extraordinarily
high unemployment – i.e., Spain (22.9%), Ireland (14.5%), and
Portugal (13.6%)—and others having relatively low
unemployment—i.e., Austria (4.1%), the Netherlands (4.9%), and
Luxembourg (5.2%). As we noted in a previous article,
unemployment in the U.S. fell to 8.3% in January 2012, marking
the fifth consecutive month that the rate has declined. To put
this trend in perspective, we wanted to look at the unemployment
trends in other OECD countries. The following chart shows
unemployment rates in selected OECD countries fr