ethiotrade

197 million people are unemployed worldwide

February 1, 2012 at 6:34 pm

THE NUMBERS:   World unemployment totals, ILO estimates -

2007     171 million

2008     176 million

2009     197.7 million

2010     197.3 million

2011     197.2 million

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Is it correct to say that a thing which goes up must then come down? In the case of unemployment, perhaps yes, but only slowly. America’s case is an example: In January 2008, 7.7 million American men and women were out of work; by January 2009 the total had jumped to 12 million; it then continued to climb to its peak of 15.2-million (or 9.9 percent) by April 2010. Since then the tide of joblessness has receded – to 14.4 million in December 2010 and 13.1 million (or 8.5 percent) as of December 2011. Thus it is taking  much longer to retrieve the jobs than it took to lose them.

How does this look in global context?  The American circumstances are not, in fact, at all unusual.  The ILO’s gloomy Global Employment Trends 2012, released in mid-January, estimates worldwide unemployment at 197.2 million – still more than 27 million above the decade’s low point of 171 million in 2007, and only a shade below the 197.7 million of crisis-stricken 2009. The OECD likewise, as it looks in more detail at its 34 wealthy and middle-income member countries, finds unemployment peaking at 45 million in 2009 and declining only to 44.7 million since. The ILO’s forecast for the coming year is uninspiring:

“The baseline projection shows no change in the global unemployment rate, which would lead to an additional 3 million unemployed around the world, giving a total of 200 million in 2012.”

So: unemployment is beginning to come down from the crisis peaks in the United States, even if less rapidly than one would hope. Abroad, it’s nearly as high as ever.

Data sources – world, rich-country, and United States -

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