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About 839 million workers still earn less than $2.00 a day as workers in developing countries are increasingly moving to better
jobs and joining the middle class, but, the International Labour Organization said.
“The developing countries are generally in a process of catching up
with the advanced economies,” ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters in
Geneva ahead of the release of the agency’s annual World of Work
Report on Tuesday.
Since the global financial crisis of 2007, the convergence between
conditions in the developed and developing worlds has picked up
speed.
Some 30.6 million more people have been added to the global ranks of
the unemployed since the crisis began, leaving a total of 199.8 million
people jobless last year, with the number set to swell to 213 million
by 2019.
The global unemployment rate has stabilised at around six percent —
a level expected to remain through 2017 — but advanced economies
have suffered the biggest rise in jobless numbers.
Developed countries have on average seen their unemployment rate
stabilise at around 8.5 percent, up from 5.8 percent before the crisis,
while developing countries suffered only a brief hike before their
jobless rate fell back to around pre-crisis levels of 5.4 percent, the
report said.
And the crisis has affected working conditions everywhere.
“Many developing countries, notably in Latin America and Asia, are
making efforts to tackle inequalities and improve job quality as well
as social protection,” lead author of the ILO report Moazam Mahmood
said.
“By contrast,” he said, “a number of advanced economies, notably in
Europe, seem to be going in the opposite direction.”
Migration patterns shifting
The shift in opportunities is meanwhile impacting migration patterns.
Some 231.5 million people last year were living in a country other
than the one they were born in, the report said.
While the European Union by far remains the favoured destination,
with 51 percent of migrants settled there, migrants have since the
crisis increasingly been moving between developing countries, the ILO
said.
More and more educated young people from crisis-hit developed
countries are also emigrating to emerging economies, the report
found.
“Already south-south migration is on the rise while workers are also
leaving advanced economies, particularly some hard-hit European
countries, for work opportunities in developing countries,” Mahmood
said.
Some 213 million people will enter the labour market over the next
five years — 200 million of them in emerging and developing
countries, the ILO said, voicing optimism that most of the new jobs
created will provide a decent living.
“For the first time in history, over the next several years, most new
jobs in the developing world are likely to be of sufficient quality to
allow workers and their families to live above the equivalent of the
poverty line in the United States,” the report said.
Despite its optimism, ILO acknowledged that 85 percent of the
workforce in the developing world will still be living below the US-
equivalent poverty line in 2018.
