Speaking About World’s Employment
In 2015, the Member States of United Nations have agreed on common goals to be achieved in 2030, named The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These 17 goals in total are reflections on how the world should be, where it is ensured that all people can have peace and prosperity, without discrimination in any form. People are expected to live in more sustainable situations, in terms of (but not limited to) social, economy, and environment. One of the goals is to have decent work and economic growth (Goal 8), which can be ensured by enough and good employments for people.
Now, what are the last states of employments around the world? For the analysis, the data were taken from World Bank datasets and based on modelled ILO estimates for the year 2019.
As a start, let’s begin with how many of the working-age citizens were employed.
For reference, we are interested in the percentage of people aged 15 and older who were employed at the time when the survey and/or model was conducted. People aged 15 at least are considered the working-age population.
As seen from the map, countries in the Middle East & North Africa region has lower employment to population ratio, with an average value of 51.1%. Nevertheless, the highest ratio was Qatar (86.7%) which is in that region. East Asia & Pacific region had the highest ratio on average (64.5%). Four of ten countries with the highest rate of employed citizens came from Sub-Saharan Africa, with Rwanda was in the fourth rank with 82.73%.
Coming into details, how were people employed in 2019, based on the same dataset?
So, What Kind of Jobs Did People Work For?
World Bank Dataset has categorized fields of works into Agriculture, Service, and Industry. If we break the numbers down into gender, income class, and work category, there is a clear pattern. As the income classification becomes more advanced, the percentage of citizens working in the service-type field is increasing, while the percentage of working in agriculture is decreasing.
Speaking in terms of employment ratios between both genders, in the two lowest income classes, the rates of female citizens employed in agriculture were higher than the male citizens. Nevertheless, the contrast is swapped in the higher classes, where rates of women employed in service-type work were higher than men.
Then, For Whom Did They Work?
According to World Bank, employment is categorized into self-employed and wage & salaried workers. The remuneration of self-employed workers directly depends on the produced earnings, while the wage and salaried workers’ does not directly depend on it.
Based on the charts above, the more advanced the income classification, the higher percentage of people working with stabile incomes (as wage & salaried workers).
Meanwhile, there is a huge gap in types of employment among income classification and gender. While the highest ratio for self-employed female citizens was 84% (in lower-income countries), for the opposite gender it was only 74% (also happened in lower-income countries).
With the highest ratio of self-employment was from female citizens (moreover in low-income countries), it would be more likely for female citizens to have less stable incomes than male citizens since self-employed workers’ remuneration directly depends on how successful the teams or the individuals obtain profits. This might affect female citizens’ ability to protect themselves when some extraordinary events happen that can change the economic situation.
On a slightly different note, in the two highest income class, female citizens had a higher percentage of securing paid jobs (among the respective gender population) than male citizens. There were 69% of working-age female citizens as paid employees in upper-middle-income countries and 89% for high-income countries, while for male citizens, the rates were 66% and 83%, respectively.
About Self-employed Workers
World Bank has categorized self-employed workers into three types:
- Employers, whose remuneration depends directly upon the profits produced and who employ people continuously.
- Own-account workers, who do not have employees for a continuous basis
- Contributing family workers, who work as own-account workers and have self-employment jobs in a market-oriented establishment by families/relatives living in the same household
For any type of income class, the own-account worker type dominates most self-employment workers. In lower-income countries, the percentages of own-account workers for both genders are quite high. Half of the employed workers in lower-income countries were own-account workers. This can be related to the fact that more than half of workers in lower-income countries also work in agriculture, where most of the works are on their own.
Furthermore, another insight that can be taken is that the percentage of vulnerable employments.
What is vulnerable employment? Vulnerable employment is defined as the type of workers who are least likely to have social protection. Vulnerable employments constitute of own-account workers and contributing family workers. They are least likely to have the ability to possess some protections (savings or funds) to offset when significant economic changes occur due to less probability of formal working arrangement.
In lower-income countries, the percentages of vulnerable employments were significant. It could reach at least 80% of the respective employed population. In terms of gender, the differences in rates of vulnerable employment between genders are quite high in the two lowest income classes. The rates of vulnerable employment for female citizens were 11% higher than those of male citizens.
Conclusion
There are still huge differences in employments in terms of income classes and genders. High-income countries tend to have a higher portion of people employed in Services and as wage & salaried workers. In low-income countries, we can find a higher portion of people work in Agriculture and as self-employed workers.
In the countries with lower classes of income, female citizens have higher percentages of not having employments that can secure their life when significant changes occur.
While this is still unfavourable, with the attention of the leaders and collaboration among the stakeholders and citizens, our common goal to achieve decent work and economic growth can be in our hands sooner.
