Writing Assignment

604 Words2 Pages

Yiuchi Wu
Section:
Li, Li
Economists and policy makers often consider unemployment rates as an excellent measurement of the economic health. I agree that the unemployment rate is a good indicator of the economy but I also believe we should not only focus on the traditional indicators because it doesn’t provide all the information of the economy. Instead we should consider looking into other indicators such as the inflation rate to have a complete story of our society.
First of all, I believe traditional indicators such as the unemployment does an accurate job on predicting the health of the economy. Unemployment rate is the percentage of the total number of people who are unemployed in the labor force. To understand how to calculate unemployment rate we must understand the terms: unemployed and labor force. Unemployed is defined as people who are actively looking for a job but aren’t employed. This is an important aspect because it tells us how many individuals are searching for a job but couldn’t find one due to the status of the economy. Labor force is the sum of employed and unemployed; from it we can determine the size of our economy and the labor force participation rate. As a result of dividing the number of unemployed by the labor force, we can then conclude the percentage of people who are actively seeking for a job in the labor force. It is evident that unemployment rate can establish how healthy an economy is; generally speaking the lower the unemployment rate results in more people having a job and the healthier an economy is. From the graph “Unemployment Rate vs. Time” we can clearly see that United States’ average unemployment rates are higher than the ones in Hong Kong and Japan. I believe this is occurring because...

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...can further improve our measurement of the economy. The rate of inflation clearly tells us how quickly the price is rising and from that we can determine what is occurring in the economy. From the graph “Inflation Rate vs. Time” we can see that the inflation rate of United States, Hong Kong, and Japan to be moving at a constant rate. Although each country has a different inflation percentage but their price of goods and services are increasing at a steady rate each year which indicates a healthy economy.
Unemployment Rate vs. Time
(USA, Hong Kong China, Japan)

Inflation Rate vs. Time
(USA, Hong Kong China, Japan)

Works Cited

Citations:
Hill, Steven. "Youth employment is bad - but not as bad as we're told." Financial Times (London, England) (2012): n.pag. lexis nexis . Web. 25 Feb 2014.
Gapminder. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. .

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