300-500 words Econ discussion

News discussion instruction

1. I ask that each student follow the news and take note of articles that are related to our course material

2. If an article is of particular interest to you, please start a discussion with the following information (approx. 300 words):

– subject: “title of newspaper article”

– body: 1) 3-4 sentences describing the article; 2) 3-4 sentences explaining how it relates to what we are learning in labour economics; 3) 3-4 sentences of personal reflection

The ground rules for this exercise are:

The articles you choose to discuss must have been posted in the week you choose to discuss them (i.e., if you post an article on September 17th, 2020, it cannot be from March, 2018).

One of the articles must be posted before reading break (i.e., prior to November 7th)

Example 1

"'It's more bad news': Report suggests thousands of workers gave up job search in Calgary"

The article can be found here.

This article, published by Econofact, gives us some labour market statistics for the impact of Covid-19 on women’s employment in the United States. The article suggests that the unemployment rate for women between February and April grew 2.9 percentage points higher than men’s unemployment during that period. It is stated that the jobs being affected by Covid-19 usually employ more women than men which leads to disproportionality in percentage points. The overall takeaway from these statistics is that this pandemic is hurting women more than men, and it is not solely confined to the United States. This is due to observations from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain exhibiting the same unemployment behaviours.

This relates to the concept of variation in earnings that we learned in class. Since unemployment is higher for women, hours worked decreases more than men which in turn will increase the earnings differences between women and men. In this example, it shows that the United States is hit harder in sectors like tourism, and restaurants. This makes it so that there is a gigantic amount of involuntary unemployment and the implication that there will be an absence of involuntary unemployment in the labour market is proven false.

There are, however, two things that I think could be improved on in this article. The first of those being that there are no statistics that sample different age groups. We do not know how differently the pandemic is affecting women in their teens compared to women in their thirties. The second thing is that there was just a slight mention as to how other countries were compared to the United States in terms of the virus. I believe that the article could have gone a little more in-depth and compared the percentage decreases in unemployment between the countries to paint a better picture for the reader.

Example 2

“Impact of Covid-19 Crisis on Women’s Employment”

This article, published by Econofact, gives us some labour market statistics for the impact of Covid-19 on women’s employment in the United States. The article suggests that the unemployment rate for women between February and April grew 2.9 percentage points higher than men’s unemployment during that period. It is stated that the jobs being affected by Covid-19 usually employ more women than men which leads to disproportionality in percentage points. The overall takeaway from these statistics is that this pandemic is hurting women more than men, and it is not solely confined to the United States. This is due to observations from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain exhibiting the same unemployment behaviours.

This relates to the concept of variation in earnings that we learned in class. Since unemployment is higher for women, hours worked decreases more than men which in turn will increase the earnings differences between women and men. In this example, it shows that the United States is hit harder in sectors like tourism, and restaurants. This makes it so that there is a gigantic amount of involuntary unemployment and the implication that there will be an absence of involuntary unemployment in the labour market is proven false.

There are, however, two things that I think could be improved on in this article. The first of those being that there are no statistics that sample different age groups. We do not know how differently the pandemic is affecting women in their teens compared to women in their thirties. The second thing is that there was just a slight mention as to how other countries were compared to the United States in terms of the virus. I believe that the article could have gone a little more in-depth and compared the percentage decreases in unemployment between the countries to paint a better picture for the reader.