Global employment deficit reached 473 million people in 2022: ILO

The global employment deficit stood at 473 million people in 2022, corresponding to an employment deficit rate of 12.3%, reported the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The ILO is the UN specialized agency in charge of labor-related issues in the world.

Among its main objectives are to promote labor rights, encourage decent employment opportunities, improve social protection, and strengthen dialogue on labor-related issues.

The global jobs deficit is a new measure of the world’s unmet need for employment.

It is composed of 205 million unemployed – corresponding to an unemployment rate of 5.8% – and 268 million people who have an unmet need for employment, but are outside the labor force because they do not meet the criteria to be considered unemployed.

This employment gap is especially large for women and in developing countries.

Although men and women currently face similar overall unemployment rates, the employment gap for women is 15.0%, compared to 10.5% for men.

Personal and family responsibilities (including unpaid care work), discouragement about the lack of decent employment opportunities, and limited (re)training opportunities may prevent many people from seeking employment or limit their availability for work in the short term.

Employment

Low- and lower-middle-income countries have high employment gap rates, between 13 and 20 percent, while upper-middle-income countries show a gap of around 11 percent and high-income countries have a gap of only 8 percent.

Globally, around 2 billion workers were in informal employment in 2022.

While the incidence of informal employment declined by 5 percentage points between 2004 and 2019, the recovery in employment after the Covid-19 crisis has been driven mainly by informal employment, leading to a slight increase in the incidence of informality.

Informality lacks many features of the formal employment relationship that are important for advancing social justice.

For example, these jobs are much less likely to provide access to social protection systems than their formal counterparts.

Overall, only 47% of the world’s population is effectively covered by at least one social protection benefit, meaning that more than 4 billion people still lack any social protection at all.

In 2022, an estimated 214 million workers were living in extreme poverty (earning less than US$1.90 per day per person in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms), corresponding to approximately 6.4% of employed people.