The is the most quoted economic statistic and one of the least understood.
It counts people without work who are available and have searched within a defined recent period.
Each of those three conditions excludes somebody whose situation is indistinguishable to a neighbour.
A person who stopped searching after two years of refusals is not unemployed by the definition.
A person working four hours a week who wants forty is employed.
Both appear in measures that are published and almost never reported.
The can therefore fall for two opposite reasons.
People find work, or people stop looking, and the number moves identically in both cases.
The distinguishes them and is the figure a careful reader checks first.
Comparison across countries is harder than the published tables suggest.
Definitions are on paper, and the underlying surveys differ in sample, in wording and in how a family business is treated.
Where much of the workforce is , the rate measures something closer to formality than to work.
Vietnam's recorded rate has been low for decades for exactly this reason and not because employment is secure.
and earnings are the better indicators in such an economy, and both are collected less often.
Policy attaches to the number that exists rather than to the number that matters.
A target expressed as an can be met by moving people out of the .
Nobody designs that outcome, and several programmes have produced it.
The honest presentation publishes three numbers together and lets the reader see which one moved.