Up to 20M jobs needed

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 11

Up to 20M jobs needed

NZPA-Reuter Paris Western industrialised countries need to create 18 to 20 million new jobs before the end of the 1980 s to prevent unemployment rising further, and 15 million more to get it down to its 1979 level, said the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development yesterday.

This mammoth task facing governments, particularly in Western Europe, is set out in a new report on the employment outlook for the 24-nation O.E.C.D. which links the world’s leading non-communist industrialised nations, published by its Paris-based secretariat.

Mr Ron Gass, head of the O.E.C.D.’s social affairs, manpower and education directorate, told a press briefing: “There is no golden road back to full employment.” Economists predict that

unemployment in O.E.C.D. States will stabilise around 34.75 million in 1984 as economic recovery under way in the United States picks up world wide.

in 1979 the year of the second oil price shock which plunged the western economies into the worst recession for 50 years, unemployment in the O.C.E.D. area was around 19 million. The rate of unemployment had already risen to 5.1 per cent by then from 3.2 per cent in 1973. The O.E.C.D. predicts that it will reach 9.5 per cent in the second half of 1983 before levelling out as the long-awaited recovery arrives.

But the report said: “A sizeable unemployment problem will remain, particularly in Europe.” Cutting back O.E.C.D. unemployment even to its 1979 level means creating 20,000 new jobs a day between 1984 and 1989, nearly twice as many as the 11,500 a day created between 1975 and 1980 after the first oil price shock in 1973, said O.E.C.D. officials.

In Western Europe 8600 jobs a day would be needed, over five times more than the 1500 jobs a day rate in the second half of the 19705.