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.

The unemployment rate is a lagging indicator: it tends to rise only once a slowdown is under way, so its change matters more than its level. The Sahm rule, for example, flags a US recession when the three-month average rises 0.5 percentage points above its low of the previous twelve months. Levels differ between countries for structural reasons (labour market rules, participation), so compare a country with its own history or its estimated natural rate rather than with other countries.

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 a monthly or quarterly request uses the OECD unless gmdb_source=True is passed, in which case the period argument has no effect.

With period=”monthly” (unless gmdb_source=True is passed explicitly) the euro area and the countries Eurostat covers come from Eurostat and the United Kingdom from the Office for National Statistics, which publish weeks before the OECD republishes their figures, and Brazil from the IBGE (as the UK, the average of the three months ending in each month); every other country comes from the OECD. The United States is extended with the months the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published since, when both agree on the months they share. None of these need an API key. The UK figure is the average of the three months ending in each month, as the Labour Force Survey reports it.

Both sources return a decimal fraction (0.036 for 3.6%).

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

Unemployment Rates in Python or via the MCP

Install the Finance Toolkit 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'
)

Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:

Which returns:

Parameters

get_unemployment_rate accepts the following parameters.

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