Jobs are a cornerstone of development

At a time, when the government has miserably failed to generate employment back home forcing its citizens to flock to Gulf and Malaysia, a new World Bank report published today said that jobs are a cornerstone of development, with a pay off far beyond income alone, in developing countries.

"Jobs are critical for reducing poverty, making cities work, and providing youth with alternatives to violence," the World Development Report 2013: Jobs stated, stressing the role of strong private sector led growth in creating jobs and outlines how jobs that do the most for development can spur a virtuous cycle.

The report finds that poverty falls as people work their way out of hardship and as jobs empower women to invest more in their children. "Efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do, as more productive jobs appear, and as less productive ones disappear. Societies flourish as jobs foster diversity and provide alternatives to conflict.

“A good job can change a person’s life, and the right jobs can transform entire societies," World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said, adding that the governments need to move jobs to center stage to promote prosperity and fight poverty. "It's critical that governments work well with the private sector, which accounts for 90 per cent of all jobs."

Therefore, we need to find the best ways to help small firms and farms grow, he added. "Jobs equal hope. Jobs equal peace. Jobs can make fragile countries become stable."

The report’s authors also highlighted how jobs with the greatest development payoffs are those that raise incomes, make cities function better, connect the economy to global markets, protect the environment, and give people a stake in their societies.

"Jobs are the best insurance against poverty and vulnerability," World Bank chief economist and senior vice president Kaushik Basu said adding that governments play a vital enabling role by creating a business environment that enhances the demand for labour.

The global economic crisis and other recent events have raised employment issues to the center of the development dialogue. The report authors, who processed over 800 surveys and censuses to arrive at their findings, estimate that worldwide, more than three billion people are working but nearly half work in farming, small household enterprises or in casual or seasonal day labour, where safety nets are modest or sometimes non-existent and earnings are often meager.

"The youth challenge alone is staggering. More than 620 million young people are neither working nor studying, the report director Martin Rama said, "Just to keep employment rates constant, the worldwide number of jobs will have to increase by around 600 million over a 15-year period."

But in many developing countries, where farming and self-employment are prevalent and safety nets are modest at best, unemployment rates can be low like in Nepal, where there is2.1 per cent unemployed, 6.7 per cent underemployed and some 30 per cent of the population is underutilised — according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) — but some 530,805 people went abroad in search of greener pasture due to lack of jobs back at home in the last fiscal year.

 

The suggestions

* First, solid fundamentals – including macroeconomic stability, an enabling business environment, human capital, and the rule of law - have to be in place.

* Second, labour policies should not become an obstacle to job creation; they should also provide access to voice and social protection to the most vulnerable.

* Third, governments should identify which jobs would do the most for development given their specific country context, and remove or offset obstacles to private sector creation of such jobs.