New York Times
December 9, 2011
During the first nine years of the euro’s existence, it seemed to be a great success for what are now called the peripheral countries of the euro zone. Able to borrow at low rates — in some cases for the first time — and benefiting from a buoyant global economy, many countries boomed.
But over the last five years, those countries have suffered more than others. Nowhere are the changing fortunes within the euro zone more apparent than in the unemployment statistics.
The accompanying charts show unemployment trends since the end of 2006, near the peak of growth and a year before the United States fell into a recession that spread around the world after the credit crisis worsened in late 2008.
For Germany and, to a lesser extent, the countries that some have speculated could join it in a new common currency if the euro zone collapses, recent years have been a time of relative prosperity. At the end of 2006, the unemployment rate in Germany was 9.6 percent and nearly four million people were out of work. Now the rate is down to 5.5 percent and just 2.3 million people are classified as out of work.
Both of those figures are the lowest since 1991, the year Germany was unified.
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