Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Although there are "encouraging signs of recovery" in the labour market, according to the International Labour Organisation, it warned that unemployment rates remain "stubbornly high" and that people are now out of work for longer. Five years on from the financial crisis, the ILO said the employment situation remains "uneven", with emerging and developing economies recovering much faster than the majority of advanced economies. In the UK alone, the ILO said that more than 43,000 jobs were lost between the last quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013. It warned that Britain was "caught in a vicious spiral of weak aggregate demand and lack of productive investment". "Stagnating wages are adversely affecting demand, which in turn is dampening real investment, leading to poor job creation – reinforcing weak demand and so on," the ILO added. It predicted that employment rates across emerging and developing economies will return to pre-crisis levels in 2015; while employment rates in advanced economies will only return to pre-crisis levels after 2017, more than ten years after the global financial crisis hit...This is a present day problem because the World's population is increasing at a ever faster rate. The politicians are trying to cram as many people onto this small island through an open borders immigration policy, instead they should be trying to reduce population. It has been estimated by economists that if Britain had a population of approximately 40m we would all be better off financially....Echoing warnings from politicians and other leaders that joblessness threatens the social fabric, the ILO said that employment trends have fuelled social tensions. "Unrest related to the effects of the global crisis has occurred in both the advanced and developing and emerging economies," said the report. "This increase in the risk of unrest in the European Union is likely to be due to the policy responses to the ongoing sovereign debt crisis and their impacts on people’s lives and perceptions of well-being," it added. "This bleak economic scenario has created a fragile social environment, as fewer people see opportunities for obtaining a good job and improving their standard of living."
The ILO said that countries needed to pay more attention to the employment and social impact of different economic policies.
“More and better jobs are needed so there can be a more balanced distribution of income in both advanced and developing economies,” said Raymond Torres, director of the International Institute of Labour Studies, the research arm of the ILO.
Its report comes days after official figures showed that unemployment in the eurozone touched a fresh high in April, ticking up to 12.2pc from 12.1pc in March.
Fears that Europe is facing a 'lost generation' were underlined by the youth unemployment rate standing at 24.4pc in the eurozone during April.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

An important question for Olli Rehn at the Brussels press conference:

Given Latvia's banking sector has a high reliance on foreign savers, particularly from CIS countries (the former Soviet Republics), are we risking a repeat of Cyprus?

Rehn says this is a pertinent issue, but denies that the two countries are comparable. Latvia's total financial sector is much smaller.


In Cyprus, the relative size of the banking sector was 800% of GDP, while in Latvia it is below 150% of GDP.

On average, the eurozone's financial sector was 356% of GDP in 2011, he adds.

Rehn added that Latvia has a long tradition of servicing non-domestic banking clients, mainly corporate from CIS countries.

And that does pose "additional challenges", due to the cross-border nature of these dealings, he adds....

(as flagged up earlier, analysts believe as much as half of Latvia's deposits come from outside the country)

Anonymous said...

Living in a country under the control of the Troika it did not take some report to tell me how poorly the whole crisis has been handled.

The Irish Government was shoved into a bailout following comments from Trichet/Merkel which caused a flood of funds out of the country.

Yes they needed help due to banking issues but if the ECB had stood behind banks as a true Central bank would have (as happened in the UK) then Ireland and other countries would not have imploded so much and so rapidly. Instead the country was loaned money not to help itself but to pay off the French and German banks rather than they suffering any loss due to their wrecklesness.

This bunch have not a clue and are only worried about the big economies but as the Germans are just seeing now - if you kill off the smaller economies then suddenly your market for goods starts to shrink....

Europe needs a Marshall plan and not just the bailed out countries and until that happens there will be no recovery.