News

In March the ILO published a report on the development of the global economy in selected sectors during the crisis years 2008-2009. The report describes global trends within a limited number of sectors with retail and wholesale being one of them. The report is updated every quarter and the current issue was prepared on the basis of statistics from 56 countries covering 85% of all countries that produce monthly or quarterly labour force surveys worldwide. 30 of those were developed economies while 26 were developing/emerging countries.





Across all sectors a pattern of the Asian-Pacific region being more resilient than the rest of the regions has appeared, with job losses being almost twice the number in the developed economies as in the developing/emerging economies.

However, in retail/wholesale the development was opposite to the global trend as the APRO-region has lost 7 million jobs from the beginning of 2008 and until October 2009, or about 30% of the employment in about 21 months. Over the same period of time European employment dropped from 32.432.900 to 31.998.500 and the trend is the same for the Americas, which started out with 30.469.700 employed and ended with 28.959.100 employed (about 5% drop). These figures conceal big variations within each region for example that the unemployment rate for the USA continues to be just under 10 %, also in the retail/wholesale sector. That APRO is hit so hard in this survey may be a result of the limited number of countries in the pool including Japan with a-near-collapsing retail sector, where monthly earnings have dropped about 9.5% .





There is consensus that from the outset of the crisis men suffered higher degrees of unemployment than women because building and construction were hit hardest and first, and only as the crisis spread women followed suit. In retail/wholesale there is a similar picture with women and men reaching job losses around 9.6%. This result was achieved by a sudden increase in job losses among women in the third quarter of 2009.







This article has also been published in the sector bulletin May Issue