Urgent attention is needed to create 600million jobs in the next 10 years, the International Labour Organisation says in a pessimistic report on the global jobs market.
"Despite strenuous government efforts, the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide, or an estimated 1.1billion people, either unemployed or living in poverty," the organisation's director-general, Juan Somavia, says in the report "Global Employment Trends 2012".
"What is needed is that job creation in the real economy must become our No1 priority.
"Whether we recover from this crisis will depend on how effective government policies ultimately are," he says.
The report says governments must coordinate and act decisively "to reduce the fear and uncertainty that is hindering private investment so that the private sector can restart the main engine of global job creation".
The International Labour Organisation's senior economist, Ekkehard Ernst, said that the recovery that started in 2009 had been short-lived and there were nearly 29million fewer people in the labour force now than "would be expected, based on pre-crisis trends".
"Our forecast has become much more pessimistic than last year, with the possibility of a serious deceleration of the growth rate."
The report refers to "discouraged workers", those who have stopped looking for work because they feel they have no chance of finding a job.
"If these discouraged workers were counted as unemployed, then global unemployment would swell from the current 197million to 225million, and the unemployment rate would rise from 6% to 6.9%," Ernst said.
Young people continued to be the hardest hit by the jobs crisis.
"Judging by the present course," the report says, "there is little hope for a substantial improvement in their near-term employment prospects."
About 74.8million youths, aged 15 to 24, were unemployed in 2011, an increase of more than 4million since 2007 in the total global labour force of 3.3billion, according to the organisation.
Globally, young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed.
The global youth unemployment rate, at 12.7%, is a full percentage point above the pre-crisis level.
Ernst recommended more public spending "to support both the domestic and global economies."
The report warns that, outside of Asia, developing regions have lagged behind developed ones in labour productivity growth, raising the risk of a further divergence in living standards and limiting poverty reduction.
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