Comments on: Tackling the jobs crisis: new thinking from the World Bank and UNESCO

By: gawain kripke

gawain kripke — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:45:44 +0000

Thanks for this, Ricardo. And sorry for being late in reading this. I’m especially intrigued by the WDR innovation of providing different policy recommendations depending on economic/development/government diagnostics. I think that is a very valuable concept and something I’ve been hoping to work on. Do you know of other good examples? I was thinking about this especially in developing policy recommendations around income inequality.

By: Rania El Azem

Rania El Azem — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:42:59 +0000

This is a great piece. Especially, the part highlighting the importance of soft skills. I enjoyed seeing it being addressed. A rare thing, despite its importance. Moreover, I wonder if the focus on youth employment, now, is too late. The rise in population of unemployed youth didn’t happen overnight. Population growth forecasts saw it coming. But it didn’t seem to be a major concern to policy makers then. The problem of youth unemployment seems to have become popular after the youth, mainly in the Arab world, starting burning themselves to death and rebelling. Shifting from one policy topic to another seems to be worth loss of life and blood. This unemployed youth will soon need retirement benefits, pensions, health care, etc. Not jobs, really. This is if they are still alive, not in prison and still in their countries. By the time policy makers agree on a policy, address this issue and by the time the youth get these decent jobs (if they do), they may already be retirees (or not even that, if they never worked, maybe they’d just reach the status of “elderly”). They may also not even afford to start a family. This would solve the problem in a way. They may not afford to have children. So the next generation of policy makers may no longer have a problem of high youth unemployment. Maybe policy debates should move away from job creation debates and focus on deeper structural issues.

By: Ben Moxham

Ben Moxham — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 09:14:34 +0000

Unions welcome this belated focus on the employment aspects of development. We’d be keen to see both the World Bank and the UK’s DFID shift away from promoting growth models based mostly on reducing the costs of doing business, towards decent job creation. Our recent report on DFID and decent work shows that it has a long way to go: http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-21502-f0.cfm