Mark Thoma  calls attention to two interesting pieces today on unemployment.  John Schmitt, Hye Jin Rho, and Shawn Fremstad of the Center for Economic and Policy Research have a short comparison of unemployment rates of OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations.  They write that the current decade has shown some weakness in the US economic model:

The case for the superiority of the U.S. model was always exaggerated.2 For one thing, it tended to ignore the relatively lower performance of the U.S. on broader quality-of-life measures like the Human Development Index.3 But even when limited to differences in unemployment, the case for the U.S. model was overstated. From the 1990s on, the United States did have lower unemployment rates than several large European economies, such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain,4 but many smaller European economies with large welfare states and high levels of labor-market regulation regularly did as well or better on unemployment than the United States. In 2000, for example, at the peak of the late 1990s economic boom, when the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 4.0 percent, Austria (3.7 percent), the Netherlands (2.8 percent), Norway (3.4 percent), and Switzerland (2.6 percent) all had lower unemployment rates than the United States; and rates in Denmark (4.3 percent) and Ireland (4.2 percent) were not far behind.

So that was in 2000.  The authors go on to point out that the 2007 numbers look even worse for the US:

The University of Arizona's Lane Kenworthy doesn't take issue with the report's findings, but he does think that it might be better to look at employment rates--"the share of working-age people (age 15 to 64 is the standard) that are employed"--rather than unemployment.  He writes that a comparison of OECD employment rates for 2000 and 2007 show the US in the "middle of the pack rather than at the bottom."

What’s happened since then? Employment rates aren’t updated as regularly as unemployment rates, so recent trends are more difficult to judge. The data below are the best I can do at the moment. They show percentage change in the number (not share) of people employed from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008, and for a few countries to the first quarter of 2009. Our economy has lost more jobs — 4.5%, or about 6.5 million jobs — than most others. (see right).

Read the CEPR analysis here.  And Kenworthy's post here.