Great Recession – IMF Blog

The Disconnect Between Unemployment and Wages

IMFBlog2019-03-15T15:14:42-04:00September 27, 2017|

By Gee Hee Hong, Zsoka Koczan, Weicheng Lian, Malhar Nabar

September 27, 2017

Versions in عربي (Arabic), 中文 (Chinese), Español (Spanish), Français (French), 日本語 (Japanese), Русский (Russian)

Demand for workers is rising, but pay is hardly catching up (photo: Shironosov/iStock).

Over the past three years, labor markets in many advanced economies have shown increasing signs of healing from the Great Recession of 2008-09. Yet, despite falling unemployment rates, wage growth has been subdued–raising a vexing question: Why isn’t a higher demand for workers driving up pay?

Our research in the October 2017 World Economic Outlook sheds light on the sources of subdued nominal wage growth in advanced economies since the Great Recession. Understanding the drivers of the disconnect between unemployment and wages is important not only for macroeconomic policy, but also for prospects of reducing income inequality and enhancing workers’ security. […]

Economics After the Great Recession

IMFBlog2019-03-26T15:32:35-04:00October 25, 2016|

by iMFdirect

The IMF’s Annual Research Conference is coming up November 3 and 4 and the theme this year is macroeconomics after the great recession.

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When Is Repaying Public Debt Not Of The Essence?

IMFBlog2019-03-27T16:21:15-04:00June 2, 2015|

By Jonathan D. Ostry and Atish R. Ghosh

Financial bailouts, stimulus spending, and lower revenues during the Great Recession have resulted in some of the highest public debt ratios seen in advanced economies in the past forty years. Recent debates have centered on the pace at which to pay down this debt, with few questions being asked about whether the debt needs to be paid down in the first place.

A radical solution for high debt is to do nothing at all—just live with it. Indeed, from a welfare economics perspective—abstracting from real world problems such as rollover risk—this would be optimal. We explore this issue in our recent work. While there are some countries where clearly debt needs to be brought down, there are others that are in a more comfortable position to fund themselves at exceptionally low interest rates, and that could indeed simply live with their debt (allowing their debt ratio to decline through growth or windfall revenues).

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Close But Not There Yet: Getting to Full Employment in the United States

IMFBlog2019-03-27T17:41:09-04:00April 28, 2015|

By Ravi Balakrishnan and Juan Solé

(Version in Español)

Last month’s report on U.S. jobs was disappointing, with far fewer jobs than expected added in March. A longer-term look at trends yields a different picture, however. Over the past year, U.S. job creation has been impressive. Payroll gains have averaged 260,000 per month—well above the 160,000 monthly average seen throughout the 2010–13 recovery.

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Battling Global Unemployment: Too Soon to Declare Victory

IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:48:52-04:00January 14, 2015|

By Prakash Loungani

(Version in Français and Español)

Seven years after the onset of the Great Recession, the global unemployment rate has returned to its pre-crisis level: the jobless rate fell to 5.6% in 2014; essentially the same as in 2007, the year before the recession (chart 1, left panel).

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Inclusive Growth=Stability

IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:48:56-04:00January 12, 2015|

By iMFdirect

In the end, the case for job rich, inclusive growth is not economic, it’s political, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Michael Spence.

In this podcast with the IMF, Spence discusses the growing sense in many countries that it’s mostly the wealthy population who are reaping the benefits of economic development.

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Smart Fiscal Policy Will Help Jobs

IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:54:11-04:00October 8, 2014|

by Vitor Gaspar

(version in Español, Français, 中文, Русский, and 日本語)

Unemployment remains unacceptably high in many countries. It increased dramatically during the Great Recession. Global unemployment currently exceeds 200 million people. An additional 13 million people are expected to be unemployed by 2018.

The most worrisome is youth unemployment. There are examples of advanced economies in Europe where youth unemployment surged above 50 percent. In several developing economies, job creation does not absorb the large number of young workers entering the labor force every year.

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U.S. Labor Force: Where Have All the Workers Gone?

IMFBlog2017-04-14T01:55:44-04:00August 7, 2014|

By Ravi Balakrishnan

(Version in Español)

It’s not supposed to be this way. As the U.S. economy recovers, hirings increase and people are encouraged to look for jobs again. Instead, the ratio of the adult population with jobs, or looking for one—what’s called the labor force participation rate—has been falling, standing at 62.9 percent in July 2014 (Figure 1).

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Are Emerging Markets Adjusting to a New Normal?

IMFBlog2017-04-14T02:06:59-04:00April 1, 2014|

By Aseel Almansour, Aqib Aslam, John Bluedorn and Rupa Duttagupta

Emerging markets have grown at a remarkable pace through most of the 2000s. They even rebounded strongly from the Great Recession, notwithstanding the sluggishness in advanced economies. Easy global financial conditions, rising commodity prices and beneficial terms of trade potentially compensated for weak external demand from the advanced economies.

But now, emerging market growth, while still strong, has begun to slow. This oddly coincides with an outlook for advanced economies that is improving, even if gradually. So what’s behind this dichotomy?

Emerging markets are adjusting to changes in the external environment. On the one hand, the incipient recovery in advanced economies is helping emerging markets, including through higher exports. On the other hand, the favourable external financing conditions are now beginning to reverse, implying a tougher financial environment for emerging markets. Then you have domestic factors, which appear to have pulled down growth in some emerging markets (see also IMF blog post on January 22, 2014, and December 18, 2013).

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Are Jobs and Growth Still Linked?

IMFBlog2017-04-14T02:10:16-04:00February 7, 2014|

By Prakash Loungani

(Version in Español)

Over 200 million people are unemployed around the globe today, over a fifth of them in advanced economies. Unemployment rates in these economies shot up at the onset of the Great Recession and, five years later, remain very high. Some argue that this is to be expected given that the economy remains well below trend and press for greater easing of macroeconomic policies (e.g. Krugman, 2011, Kocherlakota (2014)). Others suggest that the job losses, particularly in countries like Spain and Ireland, have been too large to be explained by developments in output, and may largely reflect structural problems in their labor markets. Even in the United States, where unemployment rates have fallen over the past year, there is concern that increasing numbers of people are dropping out of the labor force, thus decoupling jobs and growth.

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