| OECD says unemployment may at peak |
| Date: 2010/7/12 Click: 1978 |
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The unemployment in OECD countries may have peaked or close to peak now, Angel Gurria, secretary- general of the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, said Wednesday when releasing the 2010 Employment Outlook.
According to the report, there are 47 million unemployed people in the OECD area today, bringing the rate to 8.6 percent in May 2010, up by 50 percent compared to the level two years ago. In late 2007, the OECD jobless rate was at its 28-year low of 5.6 percent.
Though the rate may not climb higher, the lagging labor market weighed a lot on the fragile global economic recovery, Gurria said at the new conference. "This last challenge is ... the most critical policy challenge: the human cost of the crisis."
"Unemployment is unlikely to begin falling until the end of this year. Thereafter, the pace of decline is likely to be modest. As a result, the OECD unemployment rate many still be around 8 percent by the end of 2011," Gurria presented.
OECD report called member countries to create 17 million jobs to improve employment back to its before-the-crisis level, and to pay special attention to the young, low-skilled and long- unemployed people, because they are the group suffered the most and now forming structural unemployment threatening future generation.
The world-wide consensus on fiscal consolidation reached at the G20 summit at Toronto, Canada, should not affect public investment and governmental support to jump-start job creation, the OECD chief underlined.
Among difficult choices on allocation of scarcer public budget, it was essential to focus on cost-effective program and to target the most disadvantaged groups mentioned above, OECD said.
"The possibility of having high unemployment rates in 2012, 2013 and 2014 is threatening to mark whole generation and change our culture in deep ways," Gurria noted.
The 2008-09 recession impact on global labor market is comparable to the deepest earlier downturn following the first oil price shock in 1973, according to OECD report. |
