Shaping a new labour market for the post-pandemic economy

Hit hard: People with needs queuing up for food handouts, distributed by non-profit organisation Tenohasi, at a park in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo. — AFP

WHAT took a decade to achieve unravelled within a matter of months. It seems like another age, but the start of 2020 had marked a decade of decline in the unemployment rate of the world’s advanced economies.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the unemployment rate in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries increased by an unprecedented 3.6 percentage points between February and April, to 8.8% – the highest rate in a decade.