Germany - Unemployment

For Germany, key labor market indicators: Employment, registered unemployment, unemployment rate, job vacancies.

Persons in employment, as used in national accounts, include all persons performing some gainful activity as employees (wage earners, salaried employees, public officials, marginal part-time workers, soldiers), as self-employed persons or as unpaid family workers, irrespective of the scope of such activity. The underlying concept here is the person-related concept; this means that persons performing several jobs at the same time are covered only once, that is with their main job.

Unemployed persons defined by the ILO concept are persons aged 15 to 74 years who currently do not perform any paid or self-employed activity, although they have actively been looking for such an activity over the last four weeks preceding the survey and they would be able to take up such an activity within the following two weeks. That definition measures unemployment irrespective of whether the relevant persons have registered as unemployed with an employment agency or a municipal institution.

• Industrial classification: WZ 2008, the localization of NACE Rev. 2
•  Measurements:
  • Unitary count (#)
  • Thousands of persons (Ths. #)
  • Percent (%)
• Adjustments:
  • Calendar day adjusted and seasonally adjusted (CDASA)
  • Not seasonally adjusted (NSA)
• Native frequencies:
  • Monthly
  • Quarterly
  • Annual
• Start date: As early as 1949m12
• Geo coverage:
  • Germany
  • Former East Germany
  • Former West Germany
  • NUTS 1 areas (Länder)

Nnational accounts-definition employment, by industry, for NUTS 1 areas is reported by two German agencies, Statistisches Bundesamt (the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), a.k.a. Destatis, part of the Ministry of the Interior) and Statistisches Landesamt Baden-Württemberg (SLBW) (the State Statistical Office of Baden-Württemberg, part of the Ministry of Finance).

The source writes:

That definition of 'employment', is based on the standards set by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which are in line with the relevant definitions of the European System of Accounts (ESA) 2010. The average number of persons in employment in Germany over a specific period is needed, first, for purposes of continuous current labour market monitoring – comparable at a national and international level – and, second, as a reference figure for national accounts.

Depending on what the figures are used for, the number of persons in employment, for Germany as a whole and in a breakdown by status in occupation, are presented according to the resident concept (place-of-residence concept) or the domestic concept (place-of-work concept). To change over from the resident concept to the domestic concept, non-residents working in Germany are added and residents working abroad are subtracted

To calculate the monthly registered unemployment rates, the Federal Employment Agency uses the figures of persons in employment, so that there is conceptual consistency here.

Further reading

At IMF (SDDS Plus):

• National accounts
• Labor market: Employment