Israeli Finance Minister, Yuval Steinitz, said this week (mid November, 2012) that the Israeli economy has done, and is still doing, better than big Europe.
Steinitz referred to the fact that back in 2009 and 2010, Israel marked a growth of 5%, which was a huge number given the fact that this was a heavy recession time.
This year Israel is expected to be doing much better than Europe again, having a growth rate of 3.5% while France’s growth will be 0.1% and Germany 0.9%. (Germany and France are Europe’s two largest economies).
Steinitz, who is running for elections again, is also referring in his advertisement to the fact that Israel has much lower unemployment rate that Europe, though the two of them (Europe and Israel) started back in 2009 with the same unemployment rate of 9.5%.

But let’s see how the time has changed the two unemployment numbers. Israel’s data on the right side (in blue) and Europe’s data on the left (in red)

As you see, while Europe is losing it, having unemployment rate as high as 10.6% of total workforce in 2012, Israel’s numbers have dropped to only 6.7%, maintaining the decrease of unemployment and the increase of jobs created since 2009.
as Yuval Steinitz’s electoral ad puts it, “400,000 new jobs”.
However, criticism of Steinitz and his party Likud didn’t stop. Some youths (even one of them on the minister’s official page on Facebook) said that these jobs are only part-time and odd jobs.

Now, let’s focus on the language.

The word “economy” in Hebrew is “kalkala”, written and pronounced this way:

כַּלְכָּלָה

[wpaudio url=”http://www.israelhebrew.com/wp-content/uploads/economy-in-hebrew.mp3″ text=”Economy in Hebrew (Audio Pronunciation)”]
Stay tuned for more Hebrew words to learn and news to know from Israel.