Younger workers struggling to find jobs after the financial crisis risk a lifetime trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder unless governments move swiftly to improve their skills and boost investment, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The Paris-based organization said the global jobs recovery was slowly gathering pace, but long-term unemployment remained a headache for many countries, especially in Europe. More than one in three jobseekers in the 34 OECD countries have been out of work for 12 months or more, equivalent to 15.7 million people.
OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said the figure represented an increase of 77 percent in long-term unemployment since the end of 2007. More than half of the people in that category had been out of work for two years or more.
“Time is running out to prevent the scars of the crisis becoming permanent, with millions of workers trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder,” Gurria said in Paris at the launch of the organization’s employment outlook for this year.
“If that happens, the legacy of the crisis would be to ratchet inequality up yet another notch from levels that were already far too high. Governments need to act now to avoid a permanent increase in the number of workers stuck in chronic joblessness or moving between unemployment and low-paid precarious jobs,” he said.
Gurria, who also said wages had remained stagnant since 2007, highlighted the plight of low-skilled workers in Europe, especially across the Mediterranean belt, who have suffered during six years of high unemployment.
“While levels [of unemployment] have peaked in the worst-hit countries of southern Europe, youth unemployment remains above pre-crisis level in nearly every OECD country,” Gurria said. “The share of young people neither employed nor in education or training — the so-called ‘NEETs’ — is still higher than in 2007 in more than three-quarters of OECD countries among 20 to 24-year-olds, and in nearly two-thirds of countries among 25 to 29-year-olds,” the report said.
The OECD has campaigned for governments to direct greater resources to high-grade training to enhance young people’s skills. In the report it points to evidence that shows a person’s long-term career prospects are largely determined in the first 10 years of working life.
“This suggests that many of the youth who finished school during the crisis and have struggled to find work since may find their future career opportunities limited,” it said.
The report found that the UK and several other wealthy European nations had seen a shift toward part-time and self-employment, despite strong demand from workers for full-time work. The share of workers employed part-time had risen from 18.6 percent before the crisis to 20.6 percent, the report said.
The Netherlands, at 51.7 percent, ranked the highest for part-time work, followed by Switzerland at 36.8 percent and the UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden.
Wage growth across the 34 member countries has slowed from an annual 1.8 percent between 2000 and 2007 to 0.5 percent since then.
“Wage restraint helped limit job losses during the recession and encourage a rebound in employment after, but slower wage growth and real declines in some countries has also reduced the incomes of many households, further contributing to economic hardship,” it said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to