The Human Cost of Recessions: Assessing It, Reducing It

The Human Cost of Recessions: Assessing It, Reducing It

Introduction

Recessions leave scars on the labor market; the Great Recession of 2007–09 has left gaping wounds. Over 200 million people across the globe are estimated to be unemployed at present. Among countries with unemployment data in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) database, there has been an increase of over 20 million unemployed people since 2007. The ILO estimates that globally the increase is over 30 million. As shown in the left panel of Figure 1, three-fourths of this increase in the number of unemployed people occurred in the “advanced” economies (the term used in the WEO to denote high per capita income countries) and the remainder among emerging market economies. The unemployment rate increased by 3 percentage points in advanced countries since 2007 and by 0.25 percentage points in emerging markets (Figure 1, right panel). In contrast, in low-income countries (LIC) on the whole, unemployment fell during the Great Recession.

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