Global unemployment rate remains worryingly high. There was a modest recovery in the world economy in 2013 but this has not led to an improvement on the already depressed labour market, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO) in its most recent report. According to Global International Employment Trends 2014, growth in employment rates in the world remained low, unemployment is continuing to increase and a large number of potential but discouraged workers remain outside the labour market. Prospects for 2014 are not any more optimistic either. According to ILO statistics, the global unemployment rate reached 6% of the active population in 2013. This rate is almost unchanged compared to figures for the previous year and is in fact slightly higher. This corresponds to a figure of some 202 million unemployed, 5 million more than in 2012. Among young people, the situation has got even worse in almost all the regions of the world and the youth unemployment rate now stands at more than 13%. Job creation is simply at a rate that is too low to reduce unemployment significantly. Consequently, jobseekers are staying on the dole for increasingly longer periods, states the report. This worsening situation is mainly down to countries in Eastern and Southern Asia (45%). Latin America managed to limit the damages to a figure of 50,000 more people without work. Forecasts for 2014 are not any more promising either and the global unemployment rate is expected to increase to 6.1% of the active population or 4.2 million more people without work. The ILO is predicting that from now until 2018, 40 million more jobs will be created, which is far below that figure needed to incorporate the 42.6 million additional jobseekers. It is therefore predicting a record number of unemployed: 215 million by 2018. The ILO also highlights a number of worrying characteristics, particularly the average length time spent on the dole. For example, this figure now stands at nine months in Greece and eight months in Spain. In the US, long-term unemployment affects 40% of jobseekers. This development is particularly worrying given that long-term unemployment leads to a loss in skills and diminishes opportunities for job seekers to be reabsorbed into the labour market. Another alarming observation relates to the quality of jobs created. Paid employment only increased by 28.1 million jobs created in 2013, a figure far below the 35 billion in 2011 and 2012. Central and Eastern Europe, South and Eastern Asia are the geographical zones most affected by this phenomenon. At the same time, so-called “insecure” jobs (self-employed and family workers who have limited access to social protection) grew by 13.4 million posts in 2013, as opposed to 5.3 million in 2012 and 3.3 million in 2011. On the other hand, the number of working poor continues to fall: in 2013, 375 million people lived with less than $1.25 a day as opposed to around 600 million at the beginning of the 21st century. This constitutes an average annual fall of 12%, despite this rate slowing down in 2013 (-2.7%). In conclusion, the ILO deplores the fact that some countries do not have a proactive employment policy. OECD countries only spent 0.6% of their GDP on such policies in 2011. (IL/transl.fl)