[Bruce_the_vii]

You're absolutely right, the labour force does not include disgruntled workers. I still don't understand what your thesis is,


Either way, though, underployment and disguntled workers are not things economists ignore. If I'm correct in deciphering your beef, I will send you some journal articles to peruse. --unquote--


My thesis? The table about people disappearing in recessions clearly shows that the labour market is voltile. The question is what is the real unemployment? And my answer is what is the level of the labour market when unemployment dries up, the best cities in Canada? This gives you a reference point, a gold standard. Currently the whole province of Alberta is at full employment. The employment rate goes up when jobs are available, not as you suggest better jobs. There's a drag in the return to work of the discouraged worker, people make plans years at a time. In the meantime they are trying to gussy up the economy with immigration and this keeps hidden unemployed hidden. My real thesis is you should have appropriately timed immigration, not human inventory in the way of unemployment and hidden unemployment.

Do send me these articles on disgruntled workers - this is sort of my bag.

[Bruce_the_vii]

romanP wrote:

Reading a few books is a good start to get some general information, but there are a lot more than seven books on economics. I have a feeling that the information you're looking for probably exists, just not necessarily in the places you're looking for it.

Actually these seven books are on immigration in Canada and each of them are well researched by the authors so they should have reference to the pertintent data and they dont. This issue of "disgruntled workers" is refered to as "discouraged workers" by Statistics Canada and I've asked them about there data base on it and it's a working paper or two. It's very odd but as an amateur I've come up with some important criticisms of economists - statiscians to Axeman.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Below is the 2005 unemployment rate in Canadian cities corrected to high participation (72%).

One problem with the numbers is the demographics of older people. Alberta has 3% less of the population 65 or over and they tend not to work but are included in the labour force statisic.


…………………………..................Official………………Estimated Real
………………………….................Unemployment………Unemployment

Montreal……......................8.7%................................15.1%
Toronto……........................7.0%................................11.1%
Vancouver….......................5.7%................................12.7%

Ottawa-Gatineau..................6.6%................................8.8%
Oshawa……........................6.4%................................8.9%
Hamilton……......................5.5%................................13.2%
St. Catherines.......................7.0%................................18.2%
London……………………..............6.6%................................10.5%
Windsor……........................7.9%................................16.8%
Kitchener……......................5.7%................................5.9%
Sudbury……………………...............7.7%................................20.1%
Thunder Bay………………............7.0%................................15.2%

Winnipeg……......................4.8%................................9.3%
Regina……….......................4.9%................................6.9%
Saskatoon……......................5.0%................................7.2%
Calgary………......................3.9%................................3.9% (at participation of. 73.7%)
Edmonton……......................4.5%................................7.7%

[Bruce_the_vii]

And thanks for responding.

[Axeman]

Bruce_the_vii wrote:

You're absolutely right, the labour force does not include disgruntled workers. I still don't understand what your thesis is,

The employment rate goes up when jobs are available, not as you suggest better jobs. There's a drag in the return to work of the discouraged worker, people make plans years at a time. In the meantime they are trying to gussy up the economy with immigration and this keeps hidden unemployed hidden. My real thesis is you should have appropriately timed immigration, not human inventory in the way of unemployment and hidden unemployment.

Do send me these articles on disgruntled workers - this is sort of my bag.

Okay, you've said "not as I suggest"...I haven't suggested ANYTHING yet. I'm not sure who it is you think are "gussy-ing up the economy". So, are you now saying that immigration keeps people unemployed, or at least underemployed or disgruntled? If that's the case, I honestly don't know whether that thesis has any merit or not. The first peices of information I'd want to know, from statistics, would be what jobs are being created and taken by immigrants versus non-immigrants.

I'd also like to point out that we are still adjusting to NAFTA and globalization and the PURPOSE of international trade is CREATE unemployment in low value-added production. We're still in that adjustment period (which explains why your numbers from the early 90s are most staggaring). As an odd aside, the opposite effect is being seen in Mexico, where more and more Mexicans are entering the labour force as factories move there. But all of this was expected and intended when signing NAFTA.

[Axeman]

Bruce_the_vii wrote:

Below is the 2005 unemployment rate in Canadian cities corrected to high participation (72%).

One problem with the numbers is the demographics of older people. Alberta has 3% less of the population 65 or over and they tend not to work but are included in the labour force statisic.

Now THIS I absolutely agree with..and it's not just the elderly. Women are an even more skewed demographic than elderly, but in the opposite direction (and, in fact, my dissertation was on female labour force participation, rural versus urban, where I concluded that women, particularly rural women, are performing much MORE work than reported)

As promised, I will post a bibliography of some articles for your perusal.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Axeman wrote:

The first peices of information I'd want to know, from statistics, would be what jobs are being created and taken by immigrants versus non-immigrants.

The jobs immigrants take is a mute point. Someone else would take the job if they didn't. A statistic like what jobs immigrant takes, which they compute in the states, doesn't capture the fact that the labour market is highly dynamic. In addition the churn in jobs is very high, one statistic I read is hiring is 29% of jobs total a year nationally, so immigrants get churned into good jobs and bad. During the churn people get shunted out to the discouraged worker catagory. Bread winners get jobs but people with less attachment to the market force sit out. It's like a social program. The data above about the increase in hidden unemployment in the deep recession of the early 1990s indicates this is done very effeciently.

In the big immigrant cities there is aggressive immigration and this is keeping the labour markets soft and people in the discouraged worker class. In the City of Toronto at this time the unemployment compared to the level of economic activity in Alberta is 14% while the Greater Toronto Area has had 1.5 million immigrants since 1990. This is clear data that immigration is supressing discourage workers.

Another thing the statistics don't tell you is that there are domino effects in the labour market. When a good job is created someone gets promoted to it and then someone gets promoted to the job that person leaves and so on all the way down to the bottom. In the army when a person is promoted they also get a better government house so on army bases every one moves up to a better house by these domino effects and it's very topical with the wives. Conversly inappropriate immigration displaces someone downward, all the way to the bottom - which is discouraged workers.

[Axeman]

Bruce_the_vii wrote:

Axeman wrote:

The jobs immigrants take is a mute point. Someone else would take the job if they didn't.

"moot", the word is "moot". Someone else wouldn't take the job if the immigrant CREATED the job. We'd still need to know how many jobs are being taken by immigrants that non-immigrants would want and how many immigrant and non-immigrant jobs are being created by immigrants.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Moot, right. And thanks for responding.

The science of immigration is that immigrants don't take jobs from the indeginous. I've seen the statistic that immigrants create 1.2 jobs on average. I think however the figure needs some interpretation and that immigrants aren't a panacea.

I see that you are a newbie. I don't want to scare you off by haranging you about immigration at all hours of the night. Would appreciate any references to papers on disgruntled workers.

Bruce

[Axeman]

Bruce_the_vii wrote:

Moot, right. And thanks for responding.


I see that you are a newbie. I don't want to scare you off by haranging you about immigration at all hours of the night. Would appreciate any references to papers on disgruntled workers.

Bruce

Here's a few things to try and look at:
1. Anything on the Economic History of Singapore
2. "Segregation in the Australian Labour Market" - by J. Parasnis in Australian Economic Papers, Dec. 2006
3. "Do Selection Criteria Make a Difference? Visa Category and the Labour Market Status of Immigrants in Australia" - by Deb Cobb-Clark in the Economic Record, Dec 1999
4. "The Impact of Immigration on the British Labour Market" - by Christian Dustman, et al, in the Economic Journal, Nov 2005
5. "Labour Market Assimilation of Immigrants in Spain: Employment at the Expense of Bad Job Matches?" - by Christina Fernandez, et al an IESE Business School working paper, Sept. 2008
6. also check out IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor)...they have reems of working papers on immigration and the labour force

We haven't even scratched the surface here, but you should already get the idea that immigration is NOT something ignored by economists, which WAS the original false claim that hooked me into this thread. I hope this helps and please contact me if I can provide any other references or specific information you need in your research.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Thankyou for responding Axeman. There is of course a lot of literature on immigration. I've been watching the news for data on immigration for 17 years. A lot of it is very specialize, like the above mention of segregation of the labour force. You mentioned you have some references to "digruntled workers". This is more what I'm familiar with. I'd like to see that.

[Axeman]

Bruce_the_vii wrote:

Thankyou for responding Axeman. There is of course a lot of literature on immigration. I've been watching the news for data on immigration for 17 years. A lot of it is very specialize, like the above mention of segregation of the labour force. You mentioned you have some references to "digruntled workers". This is more what I'm familiar with. I'd like to see that.

I'm not overly familiar with the literature, specific to disgruntled workers. I suggest going to the IZA discussion papers. Most of the articles I've seen specific to disgruntled workers are regional case studies, such as "The Measurement and Trends of Unemployment in Indonesia: The Issue of Discouraged Workers" - by Dan Suryadarma, et al, 2005 Working Paper. There are also works specific to groups of workers, such as "Looking For the Workforce: The Elderly Discouraged Workers, Minorities and Students in the Baltic Labour Force" - by Mihails Hazans in Empirica, Journal of Applied Economics and Policy, 2007. There are also lots of historical works on the effects of disgruntled workers in the 1930s. Again, you should search IZA...there's tons of research available there.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Thanks for the references. I didn't know about "IZA". And thanks for responding to my post, these economic posts don't get much attention.

[Bruce_the_vii]

OnTheIce wrote:

Don't you have another place where you can post topics and talk to yourself?

Actually I do. I post over at the Frank Magazine site "Franksters". We've actually gotten around to having beers with each other and last time there was a turn out of 24 people, a good time there OnTheIce.

[Bruce_the_vii]

The 2006 Census gives child poverty in Canada’s main cities as follows:

Montreal City……..36.8%......(pop. 1,620,000)
City of Toronto……31.8%......(pop. 2,503,000)
Vancouver City……28.7%......(pop. 578,000)

The greater area these cities are in have been getting 85% of the immigration to Canada of 250,000 per year. The figure is down slightly in recent years. However, they are poor and not immigrant cities. The problem is economists say immigration is neutral or they say it’s an economic panacea. This is why I have pursued the economics of immigration for 17 years now.