Unemployment Rates

The unemployed are people of working age who are without work, are available for work, and have taken specific steps to find work. The uniform application of this definition results in estimates of unemployment rates that are more internationally comparable than estimates based on national definitions of unemployment.

This indicator is measured in numbers of unemployed people as a percentage of the labour force and it is seasonally adjusted. The labour force is defined as the total number of unemployed people plus those in employment. Data are based on labour force surveys (LFS).

For European Union countries where monthly LFS information is not available, the monthly unemployed figures are estimated by Eurostat.

See definition: https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm

It is also possible to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB) by setting the gmdb_source to True.

Both sources return the rate as a decimal fraction of the labour force (0.036 for 3.6%), so the two are directly interchangeable. Only the OECD source supports monthly and quarterly frequency; the GMDB is annual only, so the period argument has no effect when gmdb_source is True.

Changed in v2.2.0: the GMDB source previously returned percentage points (3.6 for 3.6%) while the OECD source returned a decimal fraction. The GMDB series is now divided by 100 so both sources agree; divide any hard-coded comparison by 100.

Also known as: jobless rate, labor market, unemployment level.

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Calculate the Unemployment Rates in Python

The Unemployment Rates is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_unemployment_rate as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2021-03-01', end_date='2023-01-01')

economics.get_unemployment_rate(
    countries=['Germany', 'United States', 'Japan'],
    gmdb_source=False,
    period='quarterly'
)

Which returns:

Parameters

get_unemployment_rate accepts the following parameters:

• countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
• period (str | None, optional): Whether to return the monthly, quarterly or the annual data.
• gmdb_source (bool | None, optional): Whether to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB).
• rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
• trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
• growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
• lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
• standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
• rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.

Related Jobs & Society

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.