Over the next ten years, the bank says, an unprecedented 1.2 billion young people in the global South will Adults of working age areMeanwhile, the labour market is expected to create only 420 million new jobs, leaving nearly 800 million young people without obvious employment opportunities and no clear path to prosperity.
The President of Singapore will be the Chairman of the Council. Tharman Shanmugaratnam and joint chairman of the former Chilean President Michelle BacheletExperts from government, business, civil society and academia will participate “to offer ingenuity and actionable strategies for job creation at scale”.
Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam (second right) and his wife Jane Yumiko Ittogi (second left) pose for a selfie as he meets Singapore athletes during his visit to the Olympic Village in Paris on July 24. Photo: Reuters
This means that the strategies developed within the World Bank Group are studied to test them in countries and to see how they work in practice. Those that prove successful will be scaled up in the future to effectively address the problems. the challenge of jobs.
This is a cooperative and ambitious agenda. It reflects the same willingness that the World Bank has already shown under Banga to provide large public institutions with financial and Actors in the corporate sector to develop common strategies to combat climate change.
We need much more of this kind of thinking, which uses the institutional and legal capacities of well-run public institutions to coordinate society’s resources in the interest of the common good. Strategies aimed at leave to the market and touting the virtues of small government should be a thing of the past.
In particular, the US market-oriented approach is only relevant for a country that is still relatively young compared to Europe and Asia, which have developed systems of social cooperation that go beyond narrow sectoral interests such as those of business and finance.
07:25
Cop28 prepares temperature check on climate at meeting in Dubai
Cop28 prepares temperature check on climate at meeting in Dubai
In the face of ever greater and more intense existential challenges facing humanity and the planet, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the market is not the only one to physical and financial resources necessary to address climate change, infrastructure deficiencies and major socio-economic challenges of a similar nature.
The same applies to the creation Employment opportunities to a level commensurate with the demand created by the pursuit of universal education. Some short-sighted people might claim that the market or the corporate sector can meet all these challenges, but this is a vain and naive assumption.
Banga and the World Bank deserve credit for developing a formula that could serve as a model for bridging ideological and economic divides between East and West, or between countries in the global South and those in the global North. This, of course, requires that political leaders are willing to put aside national and cultural biases and pool their collective wisdom.
The World Bank’s new Employment Council has not yet determined which economic sectors it will prioritize in job creation, although the focus will obviously be on young people, including womenThe assumption that the increasing demand for higher education will dampen the demand for jobs initially suggests that the focus on higher qualified employment.
World Bank President Ajay Banga listens during a task force meeting of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 24. Photo: Reuters
Likewise, the council has not yet determined which geographic areas, if any, it will focus on. The “working structure” of the new body has yet to be determined, a World Bank official in Washington told me. Even though the exact structure has not yet been finalized, the announcement of the concept sends an important message.
The World Bank quoted Bachelet as saying: “The challenge (of job creation) is unprecedented in modern history: we must provide meaningful employment opportunities for hundreds of millions of young people and women in developing countries.”
Or as Shanmugaratnam put it: “Good jobs are at the heart of aspirations everywhere, but they also represent a growing challenge in the face of rapid technological advances, geoeconomic uncertainty and climate threats.”
At a time when some world leaders seem intent on Promoting divisionIn the face of competition between allies and rival economic structures, perhaps our only hope for progress is to look to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank for guidance, where there appear to be wiser minds at work than in national capitals.
Anthony Rowley is an experienced journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial issues.
