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The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development 's latest Economic Outlook is out today, and it is full of some mildly good--if reserved--news. The big takeaway: the recovery is on, but it is slow and unemployment will keep rising across OECD nations at least until the middle of 2010 for the US, and likely later for Euro countries. Jørgen Elmeskov , head of the OECD's Economics Department, answers some key questions about the report's findings: Here's a look at the unemployment projections in the report: You can watch the OECD's press conference explaining the report, and access the full report here .

Mark Thoma has become one of the key members of the Econoblogosphere. His Economist's View blog is a must read for anyone tracking developments in the US economy and economic thinking in general. Now he's also writing for CBS's Moneywatch.com . In a recent post at his new spot, Thoma takes a look at unemployment and whether we will have to accept a "new normal" for the percentage of Americans out of work: Prior to the current recession, the target rate of unemployment — the sum of the frictional and structural components — was somewhere near 4 percent. Will it be the same after the recession ends? That depends upon what happens to the frictional and structural components of overall unemployment. Frictional unemployment falls during recessions. People are afraid to leave their jobs, even jobs they dislike quite a bit, because the prospects for finding new employment aren’t very good. And searching for a new job while still employed is less likely to be successful than during boom times. But as the economy recovers and confidence in job prospects recovers along with it, the level of frictional unemployment should go back close to where it was. Thus, I don’t expect this component to change very much. The change in the structural component could, however, be significant. I expect structural unemployment to be higher than it was, particularly in the next few years. We had too many resources in housing, finance, and automobile production, and it will take time for the economy to make the necessary structural adjustments. When this is combined with continuing globalization, as well as the higher savings rate and correspondingly lower consumption expected from households in the future, both of which cause structural change within the economy, the expectation is that the new target rate of unemployment will rise above the 4 percent level it was at before the recession. Read the full post here .

The scariest graph of the Halloween weekend came from Mark Thoma at Economist's View : Please share your thoughts on the striking percentage of long-term-unemployed Americans and what it means for the economy going forward by clicking on comments .

Flare , UC Berkeley's data visualization lab, put out this great graphic on Americans' reported occupations from 1850-2000. We learned about this from Chris Blattman , who teaches Political Science and Economics at Yale, via Mark Thoma . Blattman takes issue with what seem to be some glaring ommisions (teacher, doctor/nurse, truck driver, lawyer), thought that may be a categorization issue rather than an ommission. (If anyone knows, please share). Still this is a remarkable portrait of the shifting occupations over time. Click here for the full, interactive version.

The national unemployment rate is now up to 9.5%. The Labor Department reported job loss statistics for June this morning. Monthly job losses totaled 467,000. That's a siginficant improvement from earlier this year, when monthly job losses neared 700,000, but it is much higher than most economists expected--the DowJones Newswire Survey of economists predicted 350,000 jobs shed during the month . All told, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the economy has lost 6.5 million jobs since the start of the recession at the end of 2007. The health care sector saw an increase of 21,000 jobs, but otherwise losses last month were spread across just about every other sector: Employment in manufacturing fell by 136,000 over the month and has declined by 1.9 million during the recession. Within the durable goods industry, motor vehicles and parts (-27,000), fabricated metal products (-18,000), computer and electronic products (-16,000), and machinery (-14,000) continued to lose jobs in June. Since the recession began, employment in motor vehicles and parts has declined by 335,000, or about one-third. In June, employment in construction fell by 79,000, with losses spread throughout the industry. Since the start of the recession, construction employment has fallen by 1.3 million. Mining employment fell by 8,000 in June, about in line with the average monthly decline since its recent peak in October 2008. Employment in the professional and business services industry declined by 118,000 in June. This industry has shed 1.5 million jobs since an employment peak in December 2007. Within this sector, employment in temporary help services fell by 38,000 in June; this industry has lost 848,000 jobs since the start of the recession. The number of Americans classified as "marginally attached to the labor force," or "long term unemployed" continues to rise as well. 2.2 million Americans are now marginally attached to the labor force, and 4.4 million qualify as long term unemployed. And Planet Money pulls out another negative statistic: As of June, the average job search was clocking in at 24.5 weeks . That's compared to 22.5 in May. So we have almost the same rate of joblessness, but it's taking longer to replace a job that's been lost. Read the Bureau of Labor Statistics release on the jobs data here .

In this ad for the 1967 GTO, Pontiac introduced "the great one: the ultimate driving experience," as the General Motors division hitched its brand to the "driving excitement" ethos. With steadily declining market share and profits, the excitement went away. And now the division is going away. As of this morning, the Pontiac brand is officially done. General Motors has announced its latest restructuring plan. The automaker will cut 21,000 jobs and eliminate the Pontiac brand by the end of next year. General Motors is also trying to trade debt for equity, asking bondholders, as Bloomberg reports , "to exchange $27 billion of claims for equity to help the biggest U.S. automaker avert bankruptcy." GM is trying to prove it’s viable, a U.S. requirement to keep the federal loans. The original loan terms called for GM to slash two-thirds of its bonds through an exchange offer and for the UAW to reduce a cash contribution to the health-care fund to $10.2 billion from $20.4 billion. The bond exchange offer is contingent on the health-care fund, known as a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA, swapping at least 50 percent of its claims for equity, with the remainder of the obligations paid in cash “over a period of time,” according to the statement. General Motors was facing a deadline from the Obama Administration to put forward a stronger restructuring plan than the one the company submitted in Feburary.

Yesterday, in announcing the federal government's efforts to increase lending to small business, President Obama touted the resilient nature of small business owners. And there is some data that suggests that there was an uptick in hiring among small businesses last month. Take a look at this graph of the monthly Hiring Activity Index (HAI) figures since the start of 2008: That graph is from Andrew Gelman , professor of statistics and political science at Columbia. He reworked data from an interesting analysis post by Josh Millet , CEO of Criteria Corp. , an employee assessment firm. Criteria started tracking the hiring activity last yea r, and Millet says the 8 point jump is the highest they have seen. It is only one data point, to be sure, but it suggests that for SMBs the hiring picture improved somewhat in February. Could it be an upwards blip in a downward trend? Of course, but the eight point jump in the HAI is the biggest we've seen since we started tracking the index. For those, like me, inclined to think that the current recession, although brutal and severe, will not be as long-lasting as some suppose, the February HAI reading is cause for hope. I don't expect that January's 7.6% figure for the overall unemployment rate is the end of it--we'll almost certainly see it get north of 8% soon. But as big public companies in the worst hit industries (financial services, construction, etc) continue to shed jobs the February HAI reading offers a glimmer of hope for the job market. Small and medium-sized businesses did not lead us into this recession, but they may just lead us out of it--and don't look now, but it may have already started. You can read Millet's full post here . And Gelman's reading of it here .

In yesterday's post about January's mass layoff statistics , we pointed out that the manufacturing sector, once again, was hit the hardest. So it is a good time to share this post from Clemson University professors William Ward and William Gartner : In all of the talk to save automobile manufacturing jobs, doesn't it seem we've been down this road before? One hundred years ago it was farm jobs that needed to be saved. Later, creating manufacturing jobs was the universally-acclaimed path to economic development. As we begin this century, the immediate goal seems to be saving manufacturing jobs. When the talk turns from creating jobs to saving them, foolish economic policies tend to follow. These include trade protectionism, income support and tax subsidies. None of these policies saved agricultural jobs, but they made agriculture the most distorted sector in the US economy. So, as the political talk shifts from creating to saving manufacturing jobs, we ask: "Do we really need a manufacturing sector policy that matches our agricultural policy?" Let's take a quick historical tour. Thomas Jefferson argued that agriculture, forestry, fisheries and mining were the basis of economic wealth, a belief supported in employment terms by the US Census of 1820 that showed 83% of the US workforce to be farmers, while only 14% worked in manufacturing. By the end of World War I, farm employment had dropped below 33% of the workforce, and major programs began to emerge to keep agriculture at "parity" with the rest of the US economy. After nearly a century of these agricultural programs, farm employment represents barely 1% of the US workforce, and farm output barely 1% of US GDP-not because agricultural output declined but because manufacturing and services outputs grew faster. US farm output in 2005 was actually 2.2 times the farm output of 1961. Likewise, world agricultural output went up nearly three-fold, while farm employment as a percent of global total employment declined. Yet, government subsidies to farmers make up 16% of US farm income, one-third of farm income in some EU countries and nearly two-thirds of farm income in Japan. Manufacturing employment is following the same downward trend as agriculture. Manufacturing employment peaked at the end of World War II at 33% of US employment and has trended downwards to around 10% of the US workforce in 2008 and could easily be down to 5% by 2020. Manufacturing employment is declining, not because US manufacturing output is declining, but because, like farming in the last 100 years, it takes fewer-and-fewer workers to produce more-and-more output. The decline in manufacturing employment, as a percentage of the total workforce, is not unique to the United States. We estimate that global manufacturing employment declined 15% (by 30 million workers) between 1995 and 2002 alone (years for which we have good data), while global manufacturing goods exports increased by 27% (current values). It should be noted that China is not "absorbing" these manufacturing jobs. China's manufacturing employment declined by 18 million during that period (from 98 million to 80 million), even as China's share of global manufacturing exports more than doubled (from a 2.49% share to a 6.08% share). While we don't have later data for China, we have it for the sixteen major competitor countries followed by US Department of Labor. Between 1992 and 2007, manufactured goods production increased in all sixteen, while manufacturing employment fell in all except Spain (who started out with a 20% national unemployment rate), Taiwan (minuscule growth) and Canada (miniscule totals). In South Korea, for example, manufacturing output-per-worker increased three-fold, exports increased four-fold and manufacturing employment declined by nearly 12%. At the same time, US manufacturing output increased more than 70% (in real terms), manufacturing exports were up by 170% (in current values) and US manufacturing employment dropped nearly 20%. The future of manufacturing, simply, is fewer jobs. This is what increases in productivity means: Fewer and fewer people are needed to make more and more goods. You simply cannot save jobs in sectors where there are increasing gains through productivity. Providing subsidies to farmers hasn't increased farm employment. So, do we really want future autoworkers and shareholders to get 16% of their income from the US Treasury in the same way that farmers do? Ward teaches applied economics and statistics at Clemson. Gartner teaches entrepreneurial leadership at Clemson and is author of Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics . Gartner. The above piece first ran in Greenville Magazine .