Quiz: How much did worldwide unemployment change from 1999 to 2009?

For those of you who don’t subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you’re missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works.

The question I’d like to highlight this week is:

By how many percentage points did worldwide unemployment change from 1999 to 2009?

a) up 0.2 points    b) up 1.2 points    c) up 2.2 points

Answer after the jump …

Answer:

A, up 0.2 percentage points. Although the roughly 10 percent unemployment rate in many developed countries has received much attention, in the decade from 1999 to 2009, worldwide unemployment only  increased relatively slightly from 6.4 to 6.6 percent, according to International Labour Organization estimates. Currently, East Asian workers are doing the best, facing a 4.4 percent unemployment rate in 2009, actually down from 4.7 percent in 1999.

Here are unemployment rates in different regions of the world, from page 46 of the report:

And for more questions about how the world works, check out the rest of the FP Quiz.

(In the photo above, people queue up at a government employment office in Madrid on April 30. Spain’s unemployment rate hit 20.05 percent in this year’s first quarter, up from 18.83 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, the country’s national statistics office INE said.)