Keeping track of the numbers

Paul Krugman dissecting Bush's hired gun's projections
And employment is chasing a moving target: it must rise by about 140,000 a month just to keep up with a growing population. In April, the economy added 288,000 jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month's rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment

AMR on IT jobs
Because of IT worker productivity gains and minimal IT spending increases, AMR Research estimates that U.S. IT head count requirements will grow at less than 1.5%, or roughly 700,000 workers, in the next five years. Since India's capacity will grow by 1.5 million IT workers, the net result is that not only will the demand created by the 700,000 new jobs be filled by India, but that 800,000 existing jobs will also migrate to India. The 30% to 50% cost savings offered by India is too great a benefit to ignore and will more than counteract the jingoistic attitudes that threaten to delay the transfer of work.

Business Week's review of Rational Exuberance
From 1993 to 2003, real wages for all workers, adjusted for inflation, rose by 9 percent, based on wage and price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's outstanding, especially when compared with a gain of only 1 percent from 1983 to 1993, the previous 10-year period.

State of EU

The EU boasts of 6 million jobs created since 1999 -- the bulk in services like health care and tourism -- but no one tallies how many jobs are being lost due to relocation of factories or outsourcing of business functions, such as call centers or bookkeeping .. France had lost 1.5 million jobs between 1978 and 2002, but the country’s industrial sector was still around 20 percent of the economy.

How much productivity is eating into the jobs and how much is going outsourcing way ?