Iceland Leads Global Employment, Chad at the Bottom

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Iceland generally does well according to most socioeconomic measures. Its citizens tend to be healthy, well-paid and content. It’s no surprise that the Scandinavian country has the lowest rate of unemployment based on a new measure published by Gallup.

One of the world’s most prominent research firms calls its yardstick Payroll to Population (P2P):

Gallup’s P2P metric estimates the percentage of the adult population aged 15 and older — not just those currently in the workforce — who are employed full time for an employer for at least 30 hours per week. Gallup does not seasonally adjust its P2P metric. Gallup does not count adults who are self-employed, working part time, unemployed, or out of the workforce as payroll-employed in the P2P metric.

Also near the top of the list are nations in Northerm Europe, which include Sweden, Norway and Finland. Each of these countries strives toward full employment among its citizens. Also near the top are oil-rich UAE and Kuwait. Rounding out the better-off nations, based on Gallup’s poll, are the highly developed countries: the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and most of the largest nations in the European Union.

A better way to look at the list, which should make sense to most, is joblessness by nation at the bottom. The poorest nations in the world take up every spot: Chad, Yemen, Nigeria, Nepal and Tanzania. Almost all of these have income per person at a level of unimaginable poverty. Most also are plagued by, among other things, drought, war, lots of non-arable land and little industry that could promote a very modest middle class.

Put another way, the nations with the worst unemployment problems lack the tools, political environment or climate to do any better.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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