Question

In one year, you meet 52 people who are each unemployed for one week and eight people who are each unemployed for the whole year. what percentage of the unemployment spells you encountered was short term, and what percentage of the unemployment you encountered in a given week was long term?

Answer 1

Answer:

Short term unemployment 0%; long term unemployment 100%.

Explanation:

I met with 60 people in total, but only 8 of them can be considered unemployed. In order for someone to be considered unemployed, he/she must be without a job and actively seeking one for more than 4 consecutive weeks. If you are without a job for 1 week, you are not considered unemployed. Long term unemployment is defined as being unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.

In this case, all the 8 unemployed people are long term unemployed.

Answer 2

Long term unemployment is defined as being unemployed for 27 weeks or more. In this example there are a total of 60 people, 52 people who would be categorized as short term unemployment and 8 people who would be categorized as long term unemployment.

In order to calculate the percentage of unemployment in each category you will need to divide the number in each category by the total number.

Short term = 52/60 = 86.7%

Long term - 6/60 = 13.3%