Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 123

ECONOMIC ADAPTATION
”7
the state and private citizens positively demand work for the
unemployed. Work: productive in the general sense or not. We
may, of course, disregard “wild” enterprises which have been
and will be proposed but which are at once sorted out by civil
servants with practical experience and the men of industry who
deal with these questions. But apart from such fantastic projects
it will not do in the present conditions to put forward a claim
that the work must be productive from a one-sided economic
or even private-economic point of view. When we speak of a
whole community profits and loss can seldom, if ever, be ex-
pressed in terms of money only. In the present circumstances
values will undoubtedly be lost which for the time being can
“only” be expressed in ruined lives, but which in the long run
will also find expression in pecuniary loss through reduced capa-
city and will to work in the entire community.
According to the official Danish statistical publication (Sta-
tistiske Efterretninger, 33rd year no. 45) the total number of
unemployed at the end of October 1940 was: 108,074. This figure
has both risen and fallen since then. It has been reduced owing
to temporary phenomena, such as the intensified production of
peat resulting from the lack of foreign fuel, the employment of
numerous labourers in Germany, and other causes. But if future
supplies of raw materials or other factors necessary for our pro-
duction, or if overseas markets fail some time after the end of
the war, unemployment will rise further. Optimists may say that
all this is a war-phenomenon, that some time the war must come
to an end, and that then the terrible figures of unemployment
must fall. But the optimist thereby only shows that he expects
former conditions to return, which we have proved they cannot.
But besides the war, which of course increases and not reduces
the unemployment due to more profound forces, there is another
factor acting in the same direction which should be noted. This
is emigration. The emigration from Denmark to the United States
of America alone culminated in the five year period 1880—1884,
when it amounted to a total of 47,878 persons or an annual
average of 9600 persons, according to the information supplied
by the Statistical Department.
From this point the figures alternatively rise and fall in the
following five year periods. The lowest figures occur in the years
1915—19 with a total of 12,376, a natural effect of the World
War, after which there is a rise in the period 1920—24 to a total