Neither are really misleading or particularly enlightening by themself. In this particular case the Y-axis alone is not enough to draw conclusions because we do

Neither are really misleading or particularly enlightening by themself. In this particular case the Y-axis alone is not enough to draw conclusions because we don't know what magnitudes of movement are normal, what are healthy and what are unhealthy. Choosing 0 to 100 doesn't add anything because what does it even mean to have 0% employment or 100% employment. Those are not even reasonable bounds to start with given the topic at hand. I can't even imagine any conditions under which either extreme is plausible. A peers comp here would be far more illustrative than choosing any particular Y-axis scale. If for example the same employment figures for all other countries were plotted on the same graph, we would see extremes, from the country with the lowest employment rates to the highest employment rates. Those figures would serve to provide reasonable bookends for a graph. If no economy in the world has an employment rate of less than 45%, then a lower bound of 40% would be reasonable. If no country exceeds 85%, than an upper bound of 90% would be reasonable. The scale chosen should illustrate plausible ranges of employment for any modern economy. What does matter in all this is the time series plotting and whether or not this data suggests that there may be a virtuous/vicious feed back loop when the employment deviates from some stable level. For example, once employment falls below a certain point, does that contribute to a perception that businesses should be tightening their belts, further exacerbating the problem. Likewise, when the figures are moving up, businesses anticipate economic growth and therefor start hiring in preparation for the growth. This graph is the equivalent of measuring distance, when measuring the first (velocity) or second (acceleration) derivative might be more illustrative of how serious all this is. When matters is not how much something has fallen or rising, but how fast it is falling or rising and if it is starting to speed up or slow down.