Austerity policies shadow employment prospects in the world and about 202 million people will be unemployed this year, 6 million more than last year, according to the report on jobs in the world in 2012 by International Labour Organization (ILO), to be published Monday in Geneva, writes France Presse. “Our provisional figure estimated for 2011 show that total unemployment figures would be 196 million and that we will get in 2012 to 202,000,000, an increase of 6 million and in 2013 to 207,000,000, an increase by another 5 million,” the Director of the International Institute of Labour, Raymond Torres, announced in a press conference. ILO, a UN agency that received the Nobel Price in 1969, deals with labour issues according to international labour standards.
“This means that we will reach an unemployment rate of about 6.1% in 2012”, he said. And this raises several problems, for the ILO, given the fact that there is still a deficit of 50 million jobs compared with what happened before the 2008 crisis.
According to the Geneva-based organization, it is unlikely for the world economy to grow at a sufficient rate in the next two years to solve, simultaneously, the scarcity of current jobs and provide jobs for over 80 million people expected to arrive on the labour market during the same period. Trends are particularly worrying in Europe, where the unemployment rate increased in almost two-thirds of countries since 2010, according to the ILO. Among other things, experts stress, labour market recovery has also gone to ‘a dead end’ in other advanced economies such as Japan and USA.
“Austerity has not produced more economic growth,” said Torres, criticizing ‘counter-productive’ policies of austerity that led to poor growth and job destruction without substantially reduce budget deficits. “For example, in Spain, the deficit was reduced from a little over than 9% of GDP in 2010 to 8.5% of GDP in 2011, a very small reduction after a drastic austerity program,” said Torres, while anticipating that “the austerity trap is about to end”.
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