Global employment

Labour markets have been affected by the slower-than- projected economic recovery.Employment growth slowed down in 2013 across most regions, leading to a further upward
revision of unemployment rates . Global employment grew by a mere 1.4 per cent in 2013 – broadly unchanged from 2012, but lower than in any year of the pre-crisis decade. Employment growth deteriorated in every geographic region except South Asia and North Africa. Indeed, it was the strong acceleration of employment growth in South Asia that helped keep global employment growth stable in 2013 compared with 2012. The largest slowdowns occurred in Central and the World Bank and United Nations (UN) at different points in time.

South-Eastern Europe and CIS, Latin America and the Caribbean and South-East Asia and the Pacific. As a consequence, the crisis-related global jobs gap, measuring the number of jobs lost in comparison to pre-crisis trends, widened further to 62 million workers in 2013 (figure 3). The jobs gap includes not only the increase in unemployment, but also those people who have remained outside or dropped out of the labour force after having been discouraged by long spells of unemployment and/or perceived low prospects of finding new job opportunities.
At the global level, the ILO estimates that a total of 23 million people are currently in this situation, so-called “discouraged workers”. As unemployment continues to persist, by 2018 the global gap is projected to rise to 81 million; this includes some 30 million discouraged workers who might never come back to the labour market. The global unemployment rate remained at 6.0 per cent.