World unemployment is rising and world poverty too. The West mostly is suffering from unemployment during the world recession, while the developing suffering much more as their societies lack social safety nets. The United Nations estimates that well over 100 million people, most in sub-Saharan Africa, will fall into poverty during the economic crisis.

As for unemployment, The Economist has put together an illustrative chart:

Spain’s high rate of unemployment, the highest in the industrial world, is due to the country’s over-reliance in recent years on a construction boom for jobs. As credit markets dried up and housing values fell, Spain’s construction bubble burst. Spain’s unemployment quickly rose due to construction being an industry that was immediately affected and where jobs are easy to shed. Other industries have time to absorb the recession.

America’s unemployment, on the other hand, continues to rise even though the government has spent over a trillion propping up banks and hundreds of billions in stimulus.

What is very interesting about unemployment rates is that for many European nations the numbers are unchanged. This is not because they have avoided recession, but because they already have high unemployment rates and firing workers is hard under any circumstance.