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Unemployment Edges Higher
   Labor markets have been affected by the slower economic recovery. Employment growth slowed down last year across most regions. Global employment grew by a mere 1. 4 percent last year, but lower than in any year of the pre-crisis decade. Employment growth deteriorated in every geographic region except South Asia and North Africa. Indeed, it was the strong acceleration of employment growth in South Asia that helped keep global employment growth stable last year compared with 2 years ago. The largest slowdowns occurred in Central and South -Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and South-East Asia and the Pacific. As a consequence, the crisis-related global jobs gap, measuring the number of jobs lost in comparison to pre-crisis trends, widened further to 62 million workers last year. The jobs gap includes not only the increase in unemployment, but also those people who have remained outside or dropped out of the labor force after having been discouraged by long spells of unemployment or perceived low prospects of finding new job opportunities. At the global level, it is estimated that a total 23 million people are currently in this situation, so-called " discouraged workers". As unemployment continues to persist, 3 years later the global gap is projected to rise to 81 million; this includes some 30 million discouraged workers who might never come back to the labor market.
   Labor market developments differ widely across regions and countries. In the developed economies and European Union region, 8. 6 percent of the labor force is unemployed, which is almost 3 percentage points higher than 8 years ago. Unemployment rates in the United States and the United Kingdom have declined, whereas they have edged up further in Italy and France. Only small improvements in the unemployment rate were seen in Canada, Japan and Germany. In the medium term, only the United States is expected to see substantially declining unemployment rates, and even there, the unemployment rate is projected to remain above pre-crisis levels. For other G7 countries, the unemployment rate is not projected to move substantially from current levels for the foreseeable future.