How many jobs do we need to create to tackle our unemployment problem?
The national assembly declared a national emergency on unemployment earlier in the week. Today I had to talk about the unemployment and jobs problem on a television show. Before I went on I thought to crunch the numbers on just how many jobs we need to start to fix our unemployment problem.
Based on my conservative estimate of the growth of the labour force, which I think will grow a bit less than population growth, we need to create about 4.3 million net jobs every year until 2030 to get unemployment down to five percent. Net jobs being jobs created minus jobs lost. If we wanted to get unemployment down to 10 percent by the same year then we need to create about 3.8 million net jobs every year. If we want to just keep it stable at the current 23 percent we need to be creating about 2.4 million jobs every year. How much are we creating right now? Somewhere around 250,000. That is based on the last time we measured it in 2018.
To get some context of the scale of the challenge I compared those numbers to the average jobs numbers in the largest economies around the world over the last decade.
Yeah. If it looks like we are in trouble it is because we are. If we want to tackle the jobs problem we need to be the second largest job creating economy in the world. Even if we just wanted unemployment to not go up we still need to be the second largest. We are nowhere near that.
Our strategy for tackling the jobs problem also looks dead on arrival. Can our domestic economy create enough demand for good and services whose production employs one million people? I will leave you to try and answer that question. If there is one thing common among those big job creating economies it is that they are global looking.
Jobs data for other countries is from ILOSTAT