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Is this a legitimate news source? I have a difficult time believing this part: > The events unfolded as Zimbabwe is in deep crisis. The economy has halved in s

Is this a legitimate news source? I have a difficult time believing this part: > The events unfolded as Zimbabwe is in deep crisis. The economy has halved in size since 2000, an estimated 95% of the workforce is jobless and as many as 3 million Zimbabweans have gone into exile. 95% unemployment?

nostrademons 9y ago
Fact check on it: https://africacheck.org/reports/is-zimbabwes-unemployment-rate-4-60-or-95-why-the-data-is-unreliable/ https://africacheck.org/reports/is-zimbabwes-unemployment-ra... Basically, it's complicated, and nobody knows what to believe. The 95% figure is taken from the CIA World Factbook, and has been repeated frequently in mainstream media and on Wikipedia. However, depending on who you ask and how you count, it could be as low as 4%. Keep in mind that not everyone in the world takes Western institutions (like a national government, rule of law, and functioning economy) for granted. More than half the world's population still lives on subsistence agriculture: they tend a small plot of land, which generates enough food to feed their family and trade with surrounding villagers. These people are still "employed" in the sense that they work to support themselves, but they don't participate in any traceable economic activity.
- egeozcan 9y ago
  I thought "economic unemployment" is defined by the people who seek a job while not having a current one. People who do not seek a job aren't counted. It's been a very long while since the economy classes though.
  - lend000 9y ago
    That's just how the US Bureau of Labor defines it, allowing elected officials to make the economy seem better than it is.
  - jldugger 9y ago
    Which is a simple thing to look at when you're in a first world country with a functioning Unemployment Insurance office you can query to count such things. When you try to map that into different cultures and economic development statuses, it gets far fuzzier.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    ...how do you define "seek a job" in a place where the concept of full-time employment is alien? Therein lies the rub. If you dig into the stats, the 10% unemployment rate quoted in official government statistics - and measured accordingly to the methodology economists usually use, excluding people who have "given up on searching for a job - is based on a definition of "job" where they have worked (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour in the past week. By those stats, 50% of the country was not in the labor force, 45% was "employed" (for at least one hour a week), 5% was actively unemployed. But then when you dig further, 75% of those classified as "employed" didn't receive any payment for their work. They bartered. So now we're looking at 12.5% employment. And 84% of those employed worked in the informal sector, i.e. maybe they did a couple hours of labor for another villager. Considering the large overlap between the bartering & informal sectors, we're at around 5% full-time employment in the country. That shows the difficulty in applying models built for an industrial economy to regions that still primarily function on an agrarian economy. The definitions they use are nonsensical - they don't apply to how people qualitatively work. (There're similar difficulties applying models made for industrial economies to post-industrial economies - how do you classify someone who drives for Uber & Lyft at the same time while AirBnBing out their house, doing Instacart runs, running an Amazon import-export business over the Internet, trading in Bitcoin, and selling stuff on Etsy? Is that 0, 1, or 7 jobs? Are they a financier or taxicab driver?)
    - gowld 9y ago
      a more sensible approach is counting how many people maintain a certain standard of living (determined by local or global metrics, whatever you are interested in) without relying on government assistance or charity.
cwt137 9y ago
The Bitcoin story has been confirmed by the BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-41994362#post_5a0c6d4ae4b075b72b3c317a http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-41994362#post_5a0c...
thephyber 9y ago
I can't independently confirm, but Zimbabwe has long been in a downward spiral of hyperinflation[1] and the Wiki article describes the origins and some of the effects on the economy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
walshemj 9y ago
One of my coworkers in London is from Zimbabwe and she was telling us some of the problems her family had trying to run a farm.

nostrademons 9y ago

Fact check on it: https://africacheck.org/reports/is-zimbabwes-unemployment-rate-4-60-or-95-why-the-data-is-unreliable/ https://africacheck.org/reports/is-zimbabwes-unemployment-ra... Basically, it's complicated, and nobody knows what to believe. The 95% figure is taken from the CIA World Factbook, and has been repeated frequently in mainstream media and on Wikipedia. However, depending on who you ask and how you count, it could be as low as 4%. Keep in mind that not everyone in the world takes Western institutions (like a national government, rule of law, and functioning economy) for granted. More than half the world's population still lives on subsistence agriculture: they tend a small plot of land, which generates enough food to feed their family and trade with surrounding villagers. These people are still "employed" in the sense that they work to support themselves, but they don't participate in any traceable economic activity.

egeozcan 9y ago
I thought "economic unemployment" is defined by the people who seek a job while not having a current one. People who do not seek a job aren't counted. It's been a very long while since the economy classes though.
- lend000 9y ago
  That's just how the US Bureau of Labor defines it, allowing elected officials to make the economy seem better than it is.
- jldugger 9y ago
  Which is a simple thing to look at when you're in a first world country with a functioning Unemployment Insurance office you can query to count such things. When you try to map that into different cultures and economic development statuses, it gets far fuzzier.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  ...how do you define "seek a job" in a place where the concept of full-time employment is alien? Therein lies the rub. If you dig into the stats, the 10% unemployment rate quoted in official government statistics - and measured accordingly to the methodology economists usually use, excluding people who have "given up on searching for a job - is based on a definition of "job" where they have worked (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour in the past week. By those stats, 50% of the country was not in the labor force, 45% was "employed" (for at least one hour a week), 5% was actively unemployed. But then when you dig further, 75% of those classified as "employed" didn't receive any payment for their work. They bartered. So now we're looking at 12.5% employment. And 84% of those employed worked in the informal sector, i.e. maybe they did a couple hours of labor for another villager. Considering the large overlap between the bartering & informal sectors, we're at around 5% full-time employment in the country. That shows the difficulty in applying models built for an industrial economy to regions that still primarily function on an agrarian economy. The definitions they use are nonsensical - they don't apply to how people qualitatively work. (There're similar difficulties applying models made for industrial economies to post-industrial economies - how do you classify someone who drives for Uber & Lyft at the same time while AirBnBing out their house, doing Instacart runs, running an Amazon import-export business over the Internet, trading in Bitcoin, and selling stuff on Etsy? Is that 0, 1, or 7 jobs? Are they a financier or taxicab driver?)
  - gowld 9y ago
    a more sensible approach is counting how many people maintain a certain standard of living (determined by local or global metrics, whatever you are interested in) without relying on government assistance or charity.

cwt137 9y ago

The Bitcoin story has been confirmed by the BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-41994362#post_5a0c6d4ae4b075b72b3c317a http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-41994362#post_5a0c...

thephyber 9y ago

I can't independently confirm, but Zimbabwe has long been in a downward spiral of hyperinflation[1] and the Wiki article describes the origins and some of the effects on the economy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

walshemj 9y ago

One of my coworkers in London is from Zimbabwe and she was telling us some of the problems her family had trying to run a farm.