Before Covid-19, one in five countries were likely to see their per capita incomes stagnate or decline by 2020, according to UN data. However, in the aftermath of the pandemic, closures of small and medium-sized businesses, production disruptions in large companies and at the industrial level, financial market volatility and increased job insecurity worldwide have all contributed to further slowing global economic growth.
In terms of employability, the above-mentioned repercussions of this crisis have a major impact on economic activity in all sectors, on the quantity and quality of jobs and on the people employed.
In fact, in 2021, the overall unemployment rate stood at 6.2%, well above the pre-pandemic rate of 5.4%. This translates into 28 million more unemployed in 2021 than in 2019.
The worst is that the International Labour Organisation estimates that unemployment will remain above its 2019 level until at least 2023.
However, it should be noted that the level of unemployment does not capture the full impact of the pandemic in terms of SDG 8. This is because many of those who dropped out of the labour force as a result of Covid-19 have not subsequently re-entered the labour force. The inactivity rate was 41.0% in 2021, 1.5 percentage points higher than the 2019 rate, i.e. 147 million more people out of the labour force.
The unemployment rate also does not reflect the reduction in working hours of those who continued working, since, as a result of school closures, many people asked for shorter working hours.
As always, young people and women had the worst part. In fact, youth unemployment rates have risen in 40 of the 46 countries reporting quarterly data during 2021. In Spain, the percentage of young people neither working nor studying before the pandemic was 22%, and just one year later, at the end of 2020, it stood at 23.3%. Target 6 of SDG 8 called for reducing the rate of young people neither in education nor in employment. We are clearly not meeting it.
The case of women is similar. At the end of 2020, 30.2% of women were neither studying nor working, compared to 6.2% of men in the same situation. The worst thing is that this trend is still continuing. Women accounted for 39.4% of total employment globally just before the pandemic, but almost 45% of global employment losses in 2020 were women.
In addition to gender and age inequalities, in general, countries with the necessary IT infrastructure and skills have been more resilient and less affected in terms of employability.
The pandemic has revealed a very large disparity between higher-income and lower-income countries. One explanation is that higher-income countries had better technology infrastructures in place, which has facilitated telework. Also, higher-income countries have put in place more measures available to companies and employees who have had to temporarily stop working.
Countries that are more supportive of entrepreneurship and offer more support to young companies, and especially digital and technology companies, have also seen less of an impact of the pandemic on their labour markets.
In sum, this disparity highlights the need for smart investments to build the necessary infrastructure and adequate capacities in national statistical systems to support remote working, training, and data collection and storage. These investments are essential to stimulate the innovations and transformations needed to achieve the targets proposed by SDG 8.
The International Labour Organisation warns us of an undesirable social consequence of the loss of jobs since the start of the pandemic, estimated at over 33 million. Social inequality gap, due to rising unemployment, is deepening.
Filter by category
Filter by tag