[dsplittgerber]

The government in Germany some years ago messed around with the data and the data set until all appeared well and some parts of the unemployed population - apparantly mostly the long-time unemployed, who have no motivation left to ever leave the welfare benefits system to work again - were just dropped from the data set. Recognize that unemployment data is a government tool. It's one of many interesting data points for one's analysis of the economic situation, but by itself it's pretty meaningless as it's not consistently measured over time.