Let's start with the unemployment rate, which measures the percentage of people who want a job but...can't find one. The flip side of that figure is the employment rate: the percentage of the population that currently does have a job. Or two or three.
One way to track that stat is the employment-to-population ratio. It measures the number of employed people compared to the total number of people in the population.
So...if your country has 350 million people, and 200 million have jobs, the employment-to-population ratio would be 350 million to 200 million = 57%.
One note: the unemployment rate measures the number of people looking for a job who can't find one. It doesn't include someone who's retired, or a trust-fund jet setter (you might not be technically employed, but you're not actually "unemployed," at least according to the unemployment rate definition).
So while the employment-to-population ratio measures overall employment in a population, you can't just add up the figure with the unemployment rate to get 100%. There's a ton of people not employed...but not actively looking for work...that needs to get counted as well.
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Finance: What Does "Per Capita" Mean?1805 Views
finance a la shmoop. what does per-capita mean? well there's poor capita yeah this
guy, how would you like to be named capita and then there's per capita which [man sits under a tree]
just means well technically per head. yep comes from Latin like oh so many
things salsa dressing and dancing among others, the word decapitation comes to [dancing feet]
mind. like what happens when those flying human taxi drones get too far to the
left or when King Henry got tired of a wife. so if that happened often it had [helicopter prop]
throw off the per capita calculations. and same deal if we suddenly had a lot
of two-headed people being born like the aliens in men in black and whole bunch
other Hollywood movies. per capita is a useful metric in a bunch of financial
calculations. a common set is GDP or gross domestic product per capita .like
if you have a ton of GDP say ten trillion dollars from your country [100 dollar bill]
whateverstan, if you only have a million people that's a ton of production
productivity. but if you're say China with well over a billion people well
then it's a much lower GDP per capita. the calculations get quoted when talking
about things like cell phone monthly subscriptions, computer ownership or [people crowd around a cell phone]
particularly rollicking house parties. so yeah the notion of per capita is pretty
important but don't stress if you're not an expert yet. it's a nothing to lose
your head over. [man carries head]
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