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There’s been lots of speculation about why the eUK economy is in trouble, but maybe too little analysis. I decided to take a look at the numbers. In fact, I suspect lots of other economies have similar problems to ourselves – it would be useful to do similar analyses of them.

The first issue is unemployment and jobs. There are around 920 jobs and maybe 80 employers leaving us with an unemployment rate of around 50%. Of course this number will include some SOs that have not yet been converted into organisations. But even adjusting for this, it is a very high number.

Secondly, are we sure that there is over-investment in raw materials. The following table gives the distribution of workers by industry in eUK:
food - 26%
gifts - 5%
weapons - 12%
housing - 15%
hospital - 2%
defence - 3%
grain - 12%
wood - 21%
oil - 4%
iron - 1%
You can see that there’s a ratio of about 2 to 1 between the food (26😵 and grain (12😵 industries (not surprising since we have a multiplier of two in grain production). This would be fine if everyone had stuck to Q1 production. But upgrading raw material companies to Q2 results in an increase in productivity of about twice again. So we have ended up with much more production than we need. The situation in wood is even more extreme. Here we have 21% of our workers employed, with some 20% of our workers in the construction industry (houses, hospitals, and defence). Again the upgrading of firms to Q2 has led to overproduction. The problem is that the admins massively increased the productivity of Q2 firms several days after the start of V1 – by that stage we had already invested heavily (and sufficiently) in raw materials.

Thirdly, there has been the decline in the large firms that has been caused by the productivity formula. You will remember the endless arguments in Beta about larger firms having lower costs. Well that no longer is the case. Now the minimum cost size is just 10 workers (or 20 for construction firms). The large firms have had to shed workers. This has had an enormous effect on our economy. For example, one large housing firm in Sweden had to fire all of its 200 workers. The same has happened on a lesser scale in the eUK. Many well paid jobs in large firms have been lost. To look at this effect, I compared the list of ten largest employers at the moment, with the ten largest firms recording the largest sales in the statistics.

Employment in top 10 firms by employment
Saxton lumber - 55
RO - 37
Asda - 29
Zycon wood - 26
Zycon housing - 25
Hearts of Oak - 25
Saxton housing - 23
Saxton weapons - 21
Q5 Housing - 20
Kellogg’s - 19
Total - 280

Top 10 based on past sales
Q5 Hsing - 20
Empire weapons - 9
Aurum housing - 10
Bricks &Becks - 18
saxton hsing - 23
Aurum cuisine - 10
Aurum takeaway - 10
CQ2 housing - 12
UY Air - 2
Bargain Basement Housing - 0
Total - 114

As you can see there are very few of the old large firms that are even still on top ten large firms list today. Lots of well paid jobs have gone, I guess that each of the old top ten firms employed at least 40 workers each, a total of 400 jobs compared to only 280 for the top ten employers today.
Finally there have been other demand problems owing to the lack of wars and the V1 bugs that stopped the welfare system operating. We have also stopped our National Health Service that probably distributed around £5000 in gifts per month.

If these are the problems, what should we do about them? I’ll make some suggestions in my next article. Watch this space..