The Conference Board Labor Markets in Review™: Vol. 4, 2014

It’s been five years since the recession ended, and the global economy is still unable to come even close to prerecession growth rates; it is expected to grow by just 3.3 percent in 2014. While in some countries the unemployment rate is already below its natural rate (considered synonymous with full national employment), in others that moment is still many years away. Economic expansion and the massive retirement of baby boomers in many mature economies are tightening labor markets—but how rapidly and to what degree varies significantly across countries and occupations; interestingly, the most extreme cases of tight labor markets are within the Euro Area.