Graph and download economic data for Employment-Population Ratio - 25-54 Yrs. (LNS12300060) from Jan 1948 to Jun 2025 about 25 to 64 years, employment-population ratio, employment, population, and USA.

China resumed the release of youth unemployment data in January 2024 after publication had been suspended for six months, using a new statistical methodology. Youth unemployment hit a record high of 21.3 percent in June 2023 after having increased for several years in a row, when a spokesman of the National Bureau of Statistics of China announced that the statistical methodology for calculating age specific unemployment rates needed improvement and publication would be temporarily suspended. The new methodology does not include university students anymore, resulting in a youth unemployment rate of **** percent in June 2025. Youth jobless figures fluctuate over the year and normally peak in July in China, when the largest number of graduates enter the job market.

In May 2025, the employment rate in the United Kingdom was 75.2 percent, up from 75.1 percent in the previous month. After almost dropping below 70 percent in 2011, the employment rate in the United Kingdom started to climb at a relatively fast pace, peaking in early 2020. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, employment declined to 74.6 percent by January 2021. Although not quite at pre-pandemic levels, the employment rate has since recovered. Labor market trouble in 2025? Although unemployment in the UK spiked at 5.3 percent in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it fell throughout most of 2022, to just 3.6 percent in August 2022. Around that time, the number of job vacancies in the UK was also at quite high levels, reaching a peak of 1.3 million by May 2022. The strong labor market put employees in quite a strong position, perhaps encouraging the high number of resignations that took place around that time. Since 2023, however, the previously hot labor market has cooled, with unemployment reaching 4.6 percent in April 2025 and job vacancies falling to a four-year low of 736,000 in May 2025. Furthermore, the number of employees on UK payrolls has fallen by 227,500 in the first five months of the year, indicating that 2025 will be a tough one for the labor market. Headline economic measures revised in early 2025 Along with the unemployment rate, the UK's inflation rate is also expected to be higher than initially thought in 2025, reaching a rate of 3.2 percent for the year. The economy will also grow at a slower pace of one percent rather than the initial prediction of two percent. Though these negative trends are not expected to continue in the long term, the current government has already expended significant political capital on unpopular decisions, such as the cutting of Winter Fuel Payments to pensioners in 2024. As of June 2025, they are almost as unpopular as the previous government, with a net approval rating of -52 percent.

In the first quarter of 2025, an estimated 2.78 million people were economically inactive due to being on long-term sickness leave in the UK, slightly down from a peak of over 2.84 million people in the fourth quarter of 2023. This figure has been rising considerably since 2019, when there were just over two million people economically inactive for this reason. Since the third quarter of 2021, long-term and temporary sickness has been the main reason that people were economically inactive, accounting for 32.1 percent of economic inactivity in the fourth quarter of 2024. What is driving the increase in long-term sickness? It is unclear if there are any specific reasons for the continued growth of long-term sickness in the UK. As of 2022, some of the most common health conditions cited as the reason for long-term sickness were to do with mental health issues, with 313,00 suffering from mental illness, and a further 282,000 for depression-related illness. It is also likely that the COVID-19 pandemic caused an impact, with around 1.8 million people in April 2022 reporting an experience of Long Covid. In general, while the majority of people on long-term sick leave are over the age of 50, there has been a noticeable increase in those aged under 35 being off on long-term sickness. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of those aged between 16 and 34 on long-term sickness increased by 140,000, compared with just 32,000 for those aged between 35 and 49. UK labor market set to continue cooling in 2025? In 2022, the UK labor market was slightly more weighted in favor of workers and people looking for work than usual. Unemployment fell to historical levels, while job vacancies reached a peak of more than 1.3 million in May. Wage growth also remained strong during this period, although as this occurred at a time of high inflation, wages fell in real terms for a long period between November 2021 and June 2023. Although the job market continued to show signs of resilience, for some time, there are signs this is now changing. In December 2024, the UK unemployment rate was 4.4 percent, a joint post-pandemic high, while in the same month job vacancies fell to their lowest level since May 2021.