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Finance & economics
财经板块
The jobs boom: Too much of a good thing
就业潮：好事过头了
Are labour markets in the rich world too tight?
发达国家的劳动力市场是否过于紧张?
Last month Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, identified the most uncomfortable trade-off in economics.
上个月，美联储主席杰罗姆·鲍威尔指出了经济学中最令人不安的平衡。
“Today’s labour market”, he said at a press conference, is “tight to an unhealthy level”. In most places and at most times a fall in unemployment, or a rise in the number of people in work, is welcome.
他在一次新闻发布会上说，“现在的劳动力市场太紧张了，是一种不健康的状态。”在大多数地方和大多数时候，失业率的下降或就业人数的上升都是正常的。
But labour markets can become too strained, creating worker shortages that stop production and cause wages to spiral, which can feed into overall inflation.
但劳动力市场可能过于紧张，工人短缺，从而导致生产停止，工资上涨，进而引发整体通胀。
Mr Powell fears that America has crossed the threshold from good-tight to bad-tight, one reason why the Fed is signalling that higher interest rates are on the way. Increasingly, though, labour markets elsewhere in the rich world are also straining at the seams.
鲍威尔担心美国已经跨过了从“良性紧张”到“恶性紧张”的红线，这也是美联储发出加息信号的原因之一。然而，其他发达国家的劳动力市场也越来越紧张。
Almost nobody saw this coming. When the pandemic struck in 2020, most economists believed that the rich world was in for a long spell of high unemployment, similar to what happened after the financial crisis of 2007-09.
这一点几乎没人预见到。2020年新冠疫情爆发时，大多数经济学家认为，发达国家将面临长期的高失业率，类似于2007-2009年金融危机之后发生的情况。
In April 2020 America’s unemployment rate hit 14.7%. Had joblessness declined at its post-financial-crisis pace, the unemployment rate in March this year would have been over 13%.
2020年4月，美国失业率达到14.7%。如果失业率按照07-09年金融危机后的速度下降，今年3月的失业率将超过13%。
In fact, it is 3.6%. And America, by many standards, is a laggard. A rise in the number of Americans who have decided they do not want to work at all, and who therefore do not count as unemployed, means that the share of 15-to-64-year-olds with a job is slightly below its level at the end of 2019.
事实上，失业率只有3.6%。而美国，从多个标准来看，还属于落后者。越来越多的美国人不想工作，因此他们不算失业，这意味着15-64岁有工作的人数比2019年底略低。
In one-third of rich countries, however, this share is at an all-time high. Even among the other two-thirds, which includes America, the median shortfall in the employment rate is just one percentage point. It adds up to the quickest and broadest-based jobs boom in history.
然而，在三分之一的发达国家里，这一比例达到了空前之高。在剩下包括美国在内的三分之二的发达国家中，就业率缺口的中位数也只有1%。这是历史上最迅速、范围最广的就业热潮。
Canada and Germany are among the countries with record employment rates. The same is true of France, known for its high joblessness.
加拿大和德国是就业率创纪录的国家之一。以高失业率著称的法国也是如此。
The working-age employment rate in Greece is three percentage points above its level in 2019. Across the oecd group of mostly rich countries there are about 20m more jobs than had been forecast in June 2020.
希腊的适龄就业率比2019年高出3%。在主要由发达国家组成的经合组织中，就业岗位比2020年6月的预测多出约2000万个。
The number of unemployed people chasing unfilled vacancies is the lowest it has been in decades.
寻找空缺职位的失业人数达到了几十年来的最低水平。
Even as pricey energy and rising interest rates provoke concern about the economy, there is little sign from “real-time” indicators that demand for labour is dropping.
即使昂贵的能源和不断上升的利率引发了人们对经济的担忧，但从“实时”指标来看，几乎没有迹象表明市场对劳动力的需求正在下降。
