Data & Insights

As the Indian government released its 2016 budget earlier this week, a key question is whether it does enough to address one of the biggest challenges confronting the Indian economy: job creation. Here are some reactions from the JustJobs Network team on India's 2016 budget.

A new working paper by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrates that – while increased automation may cause job losses in the short run – advances in technology will lead to job-creation in the long-run.

The French social welfare system is up for reform through the newly proposed Individual Activity Accounts, which aim to make social benefits universal, mobile and on-demand. If the reforms are implemented as proposed, social benefits will be used more efficiently and distributed more equitably.

While a fair bit of data is actually available online, it's not in a machine readable format. The data is either in a .pdf file or inside tables on multiple web pages. Data available in these formats is difficult to analyze as it usually cannot be read by any statistical software.

As the employment and activity rates for men are already quite high in Japan, there is limited scope to further increase the number of men participating in the economy. So in order to significantly increase the total size of Japan's workforce, there must be an increase in women's participation in the labor force.

The relationship between urbanization and economic growth may actually be tenuous, and the relationship with formal economy job creation even more so. This is particularly true of newly urban and rapidly urbanizing regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

With most of India's job-hungry youth residing in rural areas, and most of its job creation happening in cities, the country must design its cities to cope with "and welcome" internal migrants.

The recently announced referendum and subsequent fears around the Greek exit from the Eurozone threaten to distract attention from the biggest issue facing the country: unemployment.

The possibility of a Grexit needs to be carefully evaluated, not in terms of doomsday myths but in terms of real social and political consequences.

If it is American jobs that the Ex-Im Bank seeks to support, such reforms must be a priority. But to kill the Bank altogether is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.