Global unemployment and the challenge to Filipinos
"Only modest gains were made in lifting some of the 1.37 billion working poor living on less than $ 2 per day out of poverty,” the report said. "The strong economic growth of the last half decade has only had a slight impact on the reduction of the number of workers who live with their families in poverty and this was only true in a handful of countries.” Hardest hit by the global unemployment phenomenon were young people aged 15 to 24, "with 86.3 million young people representing 44 percent of the total unemployed in 2006.”
The trend and magnitude of global unemployment has raised serious concern among governments and the UN, considering the difficulty of sustaining a rate of economic growth that would be able to reduce it.
In the Philippines, a recent report of the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC) said that in the first half of 2006, a total of 27,935 workers in the country lost their jobs, following the closure of 1,627 business establishments.
The major reasons cited for the business closures, retrenchment, and worker displacements were: Financial losses, lack of market, uncompetitive prices of products, high cost of production, competition from imports, change in management, and reorganization.
The country would do well to seriously consider the imperatives identified by the UN to address the problem on joblessness.
One is the creation of decent and productive employment opportunities to reduce the number of families working but still living in poverty.
One way to achieve this is through pump priming the country’s entrepreneurial program to generate much-needed job opportunities. Entrepreneurship is one of the major vehicles to economic development and growth.
Strengthening the entrepreneurship education curriculum and providing government start-up incentives and other support to entrepreneurs are steps in the right direction.