World unemployment rate soars: Report

Wednesday, January 23, 2013
[PHOTO: UNifeed] 
Geneva: Unemployment increased by a further 4.2 million over the course of 2012, according to the Global Employment Trends 2013 report released in Geneva.

The Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Guy Ryder, told reporters that "after two years of decline in the number of unemployed around the world, 2012 saw a resurgence of unemployment."

The report examines the crisis in labour markets of both advanced economies and developing economies.

The epicentre of the crisis has been the advanced economies, accounting for half of the total increase in unemployment of 28 million since the onset of the crisis. But the pronounced double dip in the advanced economies has had significant spill-overs into the labour markets of developing economies as well.

Ryder said only a quarter of the latest increase of 4 million in global unemployment in 2012 has been in the advanced economies, while three quarters has been in other regions, with "marked negative effects in other developing regions, most notably East and South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa."

Looking at 2013, the ILO Director-General said "the trends are very much in the wrong direction."

The report projects a further 5.1 million joining the ranks of the unemployed this year and a further 3 million in 2014.

Ryder said young people "remain at the very sharp end of the jobs crisis, particularly badly affected by it."

The estimations, he said, are of "just under 74 million young people unemployed globally", and "there could be another half million added to that figure by 2014."

In percentage terms, 12.6 percent of youths around the world remain unemployed

The final chapter of the report urges a policy rethink in order to achieve a more sustained recovery in 2013 and beyond.

Ryder said uncertainty in policy making needs to "give way and play more coherent and predictable policy orientation", placing employment "at the centre of policy making, in a manner that is in line with previous commitments, but not so much with previous action." 

The report estimates the quantitative and qualitative indicators of global and regional labour markets and discusses the macroeconomic factors affecting the labour markets in order to explore possible policy responses. -UNifeed
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