United Nations – The International Labour Organisation (ILO), says workers with post-secondary education are more likely to be unemployed in lower-income countries.
This is contained in the ninth edition of ILO’s Key Indicators of the Labour Market released on Monday and made available in New York on Tuesday.
The organisations said this reflected a “mismatch” between skilled persons and the number of available jobs matching their competencies and expectations.
It said the educational level of the labour force was improving worldwide, but access to a higher education was not leading to lower unemployment at the global level.
According to the report, which is part of the broader ILO statistical database, all but two of 64 countries with available data have registered an increase in the share of the labour force with a tertiary education over the past 15 years.
The biggest increases, it added, were seen in Canada, Luxembourg and Russia.
It added that at the same time, there had been a drop in the share of labour market participants with only a primary-level education or less.
The statement said that workers with secondary-level education do not automatically have a better chance of finding a job.
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The report stated that while they were less likely to be unemployed in most high-income economies, tertiary graduates in low- and lower-middle-income economies were actually more likely to be among the unemployed than workers with lower educational levels.
It stated that other key findings revealed that the median unemployment rate across 112 countries with comparable unemployment rate data increased from 6.4 per cent in 2007 to 7.2 per cent in 2014.
It added that the average worker in a high-income country currently produced 62 times the annual output of an average worker in a low-income economy and 10 times that of an average worker in a middle-income economy.
However, it added that the middle-income economies had registered the fastest productivity growth over the past 15 years.
The report stated that manufacturing employment in high-income economies had also declined by 5.2 million since 2000, while it grew by 195 million in middle-income economies.
As of 2015, it stated that 72 per cent of workers in the world were employed in middle-income economies, 20 per cent in high-income economies and 8 per cent in low-income countries.
Furthermore, it stated that the number of working poor, that was living on less than two dollars per person per day, declined by 479 million between 2000 and 2015.
According to the report, all of the declines are in middle-income countries. (NAN)