Jamaica is second worst job market
Published:Wednesday | June 22, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Steven Jackson, Business Reporter
Jamaica recorded the second highest unemployment rate in the Americas in 2010 at 12.4 per cent following its third year of job contraction, according to a just released report by a regional UN body.
Some 30,600 Jamaicans lost jobs in 2010 at a time when job numbers increased across Latin America and the Caribbean according to the report, Employment Situation in Latin America and the Caribbean June 2011, published by the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), a regional body formed in 1948.
Job growth was spurred, the report said, by faster than expected recovery from the global downturn.
Despite these gains, Dominica Republic recorded the region's highest unemployment rate at 14.3 per cent, while reform-driven Colombia tied with Jamaica to share the second spot.
Contrastingly, countries with the lowest unemployment included Cuba, Guatemala and Trinidad & Tobago at 1.6 per cent, 4.8 per cent and 5.8 per cent, respectively.
"Moreover, the recovery was more robust than expected and the regional economic growth of around six per cent in 2010 prompted improvements in the employment situation," said the report.
"The upturn was helped by the buoyancy of the global economy, especially the expansion of the Asian economies and the countercyclical policies implemented in several countries."
ECLAC's statistics reflected the official data from the locally based Statistical Institute of Jamaica and Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).
The major job declines in Jamaica occurred in:
- construction and installation down 6,400 to 89,600;
- agriculture down 5,700 to 221,700;
- hotel/restaurants down by 4,500 to 74,400;
- health down 3,800 to 25,300;
- manufacturing down 3,500 to 74,200;
- mining and quarrying down by 1,800 to 3,800; and
- financial intermediation down 1,400 to 24,300.
Jamaica's three years of job declines mirrored economic contraction over the same period.
"In 2010, the effects of the global economic downturn on the labour market continued as domestic economic activity contracted," PIOJ's Economic and Social Survey 2010 indicated.
Going forward, ECLAC expects the region to benefit from economic growth, which it said would "bring down unemployment significantly from 7.3 per cent in 2010 to between 6.7 per cent and 7.0 per cent in 2011".
Jamaica's Ministry of Labour said last week it is already seeing signs of an uptick in hiring locally.
Globally, the current pool of job seekers stand at some 205 million, or a projected six per cent this year. The issue of jobs has become a concern of the United Nations whose surveillance of world economies show increasingly that people's inability to earn, especially among youth populations, poses as much of a downside risk to the still fragile economic recovery as exploding deficits and debt.