A person is official considered unemployed if the individual is without a job and has actively looked for work within the past two weeks. Unemployment is usually reported in terms of the unemployment rate, or the percentage of individuals in the labor forms that are unemployed at that moment. The unemployment rate is a consideration in economic studies and indices.
Employment insurance is a form of unemployment benefits are payments made by a state or another authorized body to people who are unemployed. The benefits paid by employment insurance may be based on a governmental insurance system, with the sums paid by employment insurance ranging from meager and covering only basic needs, making them a basic form of welfare, although employment insurance may also be used to provide compensation to individuals in proportion to the salary he person earned before they became unemployed. Unemployment benefits are limited in how long they can collected for, although in periods of severe economic downturn these benefits may be extended.
Unemployment can be difficult to compare across countries because each nation may use different standards to gauge their levels of unemployment. As a result, in recent years some organizations such as the OECD, Eurostat and International Labor Comparisons Program have worked to adjust the unemployment data in order to make the information simpler to compare across the various countries.
