AS per ILO, the global economy needs to create 600 million new jobs over the next decade to sustain economic growth and maintain social stability.

According to the Report entitled ‘Global Employment Trends 2012: Preventing a deeper jobs crisis,’ the world faces the additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers who subsist on less than $2 a day, most of them in developing countries.

“After three years of continuous crisis conditions in global labour markets and against the prospect of a further deterioration of economic activity, there is a backlog of global unemployment of 200 million,” according to the report. More than 400 million new jobs will be needed over the next 10 years to absorb a labour force expansion of an estimated 40 million people.

The economic recovery that started in 2009 was short-lived, according to the report, which notes that there are still 27 million more unemployed workers than at the start of the crisis.

The fact that economies are not generating enough employment is reflected in the employment-to-population ratio (the proportion of the working-age population in employment), which suffered the largest decline on record between 2007, when it was 61.2 per cent, and 2010, when it fell to 60.2 per cent, according to the report.

There are nearly 29 million fewer people in the labour force now than would be expected based on pre-crisis trends. If these “discouraged workers” were counted as unemployed, then global unemployment would swell from the current 197 million to 225 million, and the unemployment rate would rise from 6 per cent to 6.9 per cent.