Business
Types of unemployment

- Unemployment is a term that remain attached to every economy, irrespective of what the market scenario is.
- Unemployment could either be forced or taken voluntarily.
In volunteer unemployment, person willingly quit the job and stays unemployed, whereas in forced unemployment a person is asked to leave the job and the reason could be any, for example, change in market demands has created the skill gap, or the domain or area in which a person is working becomes mundane due to various external factors.
There arises a situation when a person willingly give up working and the reason behind this could be many, be it the health issues one is facing or the jobs are not motivating or interesting enough to attract a person.
Unemployment is of many types of, let’s discuss here few of them.
Cyclical unemployment
In this type of unemployment, the person loses the job due to the downfall in the aggregate demand. The cyclical unemployment is also termed as general, Keynesian unemployment or the demand deficient.
Unemployment rising due to demand deficient
Unemployment prevailing due to the deficiency in demand is the situation when demand becomes insufficient and can’t generate the enough employment for the people.
Regional unemployment
When the impact of structural unemployment starts showing the affects on local areas and markets of economy, then the regional unemployment occurs.
Changes in the conditions of the market that prevails for long term, lead to the downfall of a particular industry, hence structural unemployment arises. Globalisation is another reason why some countries faces structural unemployment.
Classical unemployment
Classical unemployment is also termed as real wage unemployment, occurs due to the high wages. In this scenario the cause of the unemployment is the job rejection by a person due to the lower wages, or when high wages are demanded by them.
Frictional unemployment
Frictional unemployment is the situation when a person lose their job and is looking for a new one. Though not much of a help is provided to curb the frictional unemployment, but yes, better information is one possible way to minimise the tenure of job searching. Full employment is not a possibility, because there might be people who will always be looking forward to change the jobs.
Seasonal unemployment
The reason behind the existence of seasonal unemployment is that there are some firms that are engaged in production in a particular season of the year. Construction, tourism, farming are few of the examples of seasonal unemployment.
Reasons behind the unemployment
- As the competition increases in the local market, chances of unemployment also increase
- Globalisation is another biggest reason of unemployment
- Third reason behind the unemployment is immobility of labours
Labour immobility is a situation that arises when companies ask a person to leave or displace them, during their downfall and are unable to provide them the employment when their growth phase starts.LabourImmobility also arises when a person refuses to change the place, reason could be any, be it their family ties or the education of their children getting disrupted. Monetary aspects also plays a major role in labour immobility because as the place changes expenses too increase and maybe a person is not ready to bear that.
So when it comes to unemployment, there are the factors and scenarios that are out of our control. No matter how much efforts we make, unemployment won’t be reduced fully, but it could be minimised through proper research and efficient brainstorming.
Business
Running boom to help Puma recover after slow start

By Emma Thomasson
BERLIN (Reuters) – German sportswear company Puma expects the financial impact from coronavirus lockdowns to last well into the second quarter, but believes global growth in running should help to support a strong improvement after that.
“We clearly see a running boom in the whole world,” Chief Executive Bjorn Gulden told journalists, noting that yoga and other outdoor activities are also doing well. He expects the healthy living trend to continue even after the pandemic.
Gulden said his optimism is underlined by the fact that orders for 2021 are up almost 30% compared to a year ago, with bookings for running products particularly high.
However, there is still uncertainty about when lockdowns in Europe will end, with about half of the stores selling its products currently closed in its home region.
For the full year, Puma expects at least a moderate increase in sales in constant currency, with an upside potential, and a significant improvement for both its operating and net profit compared with 2020.
Shares in Puma were down 2.9% at 1100 GMT.
“The wording on outlook looks softer than we had anticipated, even by Puma’s cautious standards,” said Jefferies analyst James Grzinic.
Gulden noted that a shortage of shipping containers bringing products made in Asia would impact margins, with freight rates likely to double in the next 12 months.
Puma will put a stronger focus on the women’s market in future, Gulden said, creating shoes better modelled to female feet for running and soccer and capitalising on partnerships with celebrities like singer Dua Lipa and model Cara Delevingne.
Gulden admitted Puma had been slow in creating its own app, but it plans to launch one towards the end of the year, further supporting online sales, which grew by 63% in 2020.
Rival Nike in December raised its full-year sales forecast after demand for outdoor sportswear drove an 84% surge in online sales.
Gulden said he is hopeful that the Olympics will go ahead in Japan and the European soccer championship will also take place after both were postponed from 2020.
($1 = 0.8226 euros)
(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Mark Potter and Keith Weir)
Business
ExxonMobil to sell some UK, North Sea assets to HitecVision for over $1 billion

(Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp said on Wednesday it would sell its non-operating interest in its UK and North Sea exploration and production assets to private-equity fund HitecVision for more than $1 billion.
Exxon has been looking to sell its oil and gas assets since late 2019, seeking to free up cash to focus on a handful of mega-projects.
The deal includes ownership interests in 14 producing fields operated primarily by Shell as well as interests in the associated infrastructure. Exxon could also receive about $300 million in contingent payments based on a potential for increase in commodity prices.
Exxon’s share of production from these fields was about 38,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2019, the company said.
Exxon said it would retain its non-operated share in upstream assets in the southern part of the North Sea as well as its interest in the Shell Esso gas and liquids (SEGAL) infrastructure, which supplies ethane to the company’s Fife ethylene plant.
HitecVision, in partnership with Eni, had bought Exxon’s Norwegian North Sea assets for $4.5 billion in 2019.
Initially, Exxon hoped to raise more than $2 billion from the sale, which was planned for late 2019. In June 2020 sources told Reuters that the portfolio was more likely to fetch $1 to $1.5 billion given the oil price weakness last year.
(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
Business
JPMorgan’s blockchain payments test is literally out of this world

By Anna Irrera
LONDON (Reuters) – Stuck in space with bills to pay? Don’t worry, the satellites could take care of it.
JPMorgan Chase & Co has recently tested blockchain payments between satellites orbiting the earth, executives at the bank told Reuters, showing that digital devices could use the technology behind virtual currencies for transactions.
The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), where devices connect to one another, is most associated with consumer electronics, including smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home, and banks want to be ready to process payments when these smart devices start doing transactions autonomously.Umar Farooq, the CEO of JPMorgan’s blockchain business Onyx, thought space was a cool place to try it out.
“The idea was to explore IoT payments in a fully decentralised way,” Farooq said. “Nowhere is more decentralised and detached from earth than space.”
“Secondly we are nerdy and it was a much more fun way to test IoT,” he said.
To run the space experiment, the bank’s blockchain team did not send its own satellites into space, but worked with Danish company GOMspace, which allows third parties to run software on its satellites.
Farooq said the satellite test showed blockchain networks could power transactions between every day objects.
The test also showed it could be possible to create a marketplace where satellites send each other data in exchange for payments, as more private companies launch their own devices into space, Tyrone Lobban, head of blockchain launch, at Onyx said.
Back on earth, examples of IoT payments that could become a reality sooner include a smart fridge ordering and paying for milk on an ecommerce site, or a self-driving car paying for gas Farooq said.
Blockchain, which first emerged as the software underpinning cryptocurrencies, is a shared digital ledger of transactions. Financial companies have invested millions of dollars to find uses for the technology hoping it can reduce costs and simplify more complex IT processes, such as securities settlement or international payments.
But so far, blockchain has yet to have widespread impact in financial services.
JPMorgan has been one of the most active banks in blockchain, announcing it had created its own distributed ledger called Quorum in 2016, which was sold to blockchain company Consensys last year. The bank also developed a digital coin called JPM Coin and in 2020 created Onyx.
Onyx has more than 100 employees and its blockchain applications are close to generating revenues for the bank, it said.
Among the division’s applications is Liink, a payments information network involving more than 400 banks, a project to replace paper checks and IoT experiments, Farooq said.
(Reporting by Anna Irrera. Editing by Jane Merriman)