[Africa] Global Economic Growth Fails to Lift Africans Out of Poverty - ILO

from All Africa

Larry Moonze
Lusaka

THE International Labour Organisation has said severe working poverty is growing in Africa as globalisation has failed to create new quality jobs.

According to the ILO fourth edition of Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), global economic growth is increasingly failing to translate into new and better jobs that lead to a reduction in poverty.

The KILM indicate that the number of workers living on less than US $1 per day has increased by 28 million in sub-Saharan Africa between 1994 and 2004.

"While the most severe working poverty is growing in Africa, it is declining in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe," states the report. "The total number of working women and men living on less than $2 a day has not fallen over the past decade although at 1.38 billion, it is a smaller share of global employment at just below 50 per cent, a decline from 57 per cent in 1994."

The report emphasises that in many developing economies the problem is mainly a lack of decent and productive work opportunities rather than outright unemployment. "Women and men are working long and hard for very little because their only alternative is to have no income at all," the KILM states.

It states that youth unemployment rates were typically at least twice as high as adult rates and are sometimes much higher. However, the KILM states that in most countries, the illiteracy rates of adults were higher than those of youth suggesting that young people are increasingly better prepared for the labour market.

ILO director general Juan Somavia said half the world's workers still did not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US $2 a day poverty line.

"The key message is that up to now better jobs and income for the world's workers has not been a priority in policy-making", said Somavia. "Globalisation has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies. This report can be a useful tool for promoting that objective."

The study finds that while in some areas of Asia economic expansion is fostering solid growth in jobs and improvements in living conditions, other areas such as Africa and parts of Latin America were seeing increasing numbers of people working in less favourable conditions, especially in the agricultural sector.

The new KILM paints an in-depth picture of both the quantity and quality of jobs around the world by examining 20 key indicators of the labour market. The KILM covers quantitative topics such as labour force participation, employment, inactivity, employment elasticities, sectoral employment, labour productivity and unemployment, and qualitative issues such as hours worked, wages, employment status, unemployment duration and others.

It states that economic growth was not leading to job creation. "In recent years there has been a weakening relationship between economic growth and employment growth, meaning that growth is not automatically translating into new jobs," it states.

The biennial study found that for every one percentage point of additional gross domestic product (GDP) growth, total global employment grew by only 0.30 percentage points between 1999 and 2003, a drop from 0.38 percentage points between 1995 and 1999.