From the World Development Report 2013.
Looking through the jobs lens and focusing on the key features of the different country types can help identify more clearly the kinds of jobs that would make the greatest contribution to development in each case. This focus allows for a richer analysis of the potential tradeoffs between living standards, productivity, and social cohesion in a specific context.
From the World Development Report 2013
621 million young people are “idle”—not in school or training, not employed, and not looking for work. Rates of idleness vary across countries, ranging between 10 and 50 percent among 15- to 24-year-olds.
How do you measure unemployment? By counting the number of people looking for work but unable to find it. However, this measure overlooks people willing to work and not necessarily looking for jobs. In an interesting chart, The Economist illustrates how a broader measure makes unemployment in Europe look even worse.
Jobs have been at the center of my life since I took up my own new job as World Bank Chief Economist on October 1. This began within hours of my joining the Bank, when I participated in the press launch of the World Development Report 2013 on Jobs. Following that, my interactions at the Tokyo Annual Meetings of the World Bank and IMF also brought the jobs issue into high relief, with ministers and policymakers from around the world reacting to the WDR, especially in some of my corridor conversations with them.
I have a longstanding interest in labor-related issues, the role of labor laws, and on the impact of privatization on jobs. So I was pleased by the clairvoyance of the World Bank in choosing jobs as the topic for the 2013 World Development Report, much before the Bank knew that it would choose me to be the Chief Economist.
From the World Development Report 2013.
Jobs are on the move. The past four decades have been marked by the outsourcing of manufacturing tasks from industrial countries to the developing world, especially to East Asia.
When my team and I started working on the World Development Report 2013, slightly more than a year ago, we were puzzled. We had been asked to write about jobs, and there was no doubt that they were a major concern around the world. Events such as the global crisis or the Arab spring had put jobs center stage. In developing countries, finding employment opportunities for massive numbers of youth entering the labor force was urgent. Middle-income countries were struggling to move up the value-added ladder in production and to extend the coverage of social protection. Technology and globalization were changing the nature of work worldwide. In all cases, jobs were at stake. And they were clearly one of the main preoccupations of policy makers everywhere.
Given worldwide concern over jobs, it makes sense that the 2013 World Development Report (WDR) is on jobs. According the ILO, though growth has resumed in some regions, the global employment situation is bleak and shows no sign of recovery in the near term.
The WDR, which is being launched this autumn, will posit that jobs are more than what people earn or what they do at work -- they are also part of who they are. With that in mind, the report will use a jobs lens to look at multiple outcomes associated with jobs – how they contribute to living standards, productivity and social cohesion.
