Almost 200 million people around the world were unemployed last year, a
report by the United Nations’ labour agency says. PHOTO/FILE
Almost 200 million people around the world were unemployed last year, a report by the United Nations’ labour agency says.
A
report by the International Labour Organisation says latest statistics
show an increase of almost five million compared with the previous year
(2012).
“This reflects the fact that employment is not expanding sufficiently fast to keep up with the growing labour force,” it adds.
The bulk of the increase in global unemployment is in East Asia and South Asia.
The
two regions represent more than 45 per cent of additional job seekers,
followed by Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. By contrast, Latin America
added fewer than 50,000 to the global number — about one per cent of the
total increase in unemployment in 2013.
“Overall, the
crisis-related global jobs gap that has opened up since the beginning of
the financial crisis in 2008, over and above an already large number of
job seekers, continues to widen,” the report observes.
In
2013, this gap reached 62 million jobs, including 32 million additional
job seekers, 23 million people that became discouraged and seven
million economically inactive people that prefer not to participate in
the labour market.
Set to worsen
“If
current trends continue, global unemployment is set to worsen, albeit
gradually, reaching more than 215 million job seekers by 2018,” the
survey adds.
The UN says around 40 million new jobs
are created every year, which is less than the 42.6 million people that
are expected to enter the labour market.
“The global
unemployment rate would remain broadly constant during the next five
years, at half a percentage point higher than before the crisis.”
The
report shows that developing countries that invested in quality jobs
from the early 2000s grew nearly one percentage point faster every year
since 2007 and were better able to weather the economic crisis than
comparable economies.
The ILO annual report, The World
of Work 2014, this year focuses on the relationship between good jobs
and national development through analysis of 140 developing and emerging
nations.
The director-general of the ILO, Mr Guy
Ryder, said in a news release on the launch of the report that decent
work opportunities for women and men help trigger development and reduce
poverty. “Development doesn’t happen through such things as exports,
open trade and foreign direct investment on their own,” Mr Ryder said.
“Social
protection, respect for core labour standards and policies that promote
formal employment are also crucial for creating quality jobs that raise
living standards, increase domestic consumption and drive overall
growth,” he added.
The report, which also covers
global unemployment figures, social protection measures and economic
migration flows, shows a smaller increase in unemployment than previous
projections, with some 200 million out of work in 2013, predicted to
rise by 3.2 million through 2014.
“The uneven economic
recovery and successive downward revisions in economic growth
projections have had an impact on the global employment situation,” the
report notes.
It adds that youth continue to be
particularly affected by the weak and uneven recovery. It is estimated
that some 74.5 million youth – aged 15–24 – were unemployed in 2013;
that is almost 1 million more than in the year before.
“The
global youth unemployment rate has reached 13.1 per cent, which is
almost three times as high as the adult unemployment rate,” it warns.
It
reveals that the youth-to-adult unemployment ratio has reached a
historical peak. It is particularly high in the Middle East and North
Africa, as well as in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and
Southern Europe.
The report cites Senegal, where wage
and salaried workers increased from around 12 per cent in 1991 to 26 per
cent in 2013, as a case in point, showing that productivity increased
there by an average of 0.5 per cent per year.
In Peru,
it says, wage and salaried workers increased by an estimated 15
percentage points, and productivity grew by an average of 1.8 per cent
per year. In both countries, inequality was also reduced as the
percentage of working poor declined, it says.
It says
the recovery remains weak, the average length of unemployment spells has
increased considerably, a further sign of feeble job creation.
In many advanced economies, the duration of unemployment has doubled in comparison with the pre-crisis situation.
No comments :
Post a Comment