An Economic Analysis Of Covid-19 Pandemic And The Rising Global Unemployment

Recent statistical estimates from numerous international organizations and in particular, the International Labour Organization pointed to a significant increase in global unemployment and underemployment rate following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. From this negative statistics, the research surveyed the global economy with a view to highlighting the extent to which COVID-19 has worsened unemployment in the world. Statistical analysis encompassing selected countries of the world including China, Europe, United States of America, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa amongst others all confirmed that COVID-19 has increased and indeed worsened unemployment in the world. This became possible through the responses by individual countries that included travel bans, lockdowns, business closures and varying quarantine measures which clearly prohibited labour movement and hence decreased labour productivity. It was more worrisome that while the developed countries were already making concerted efforts to reduce unemployment by introducing employment creation schemes, developing economies had no concrete measures in place to fight unemployment and were still battling with basic testing infrastructure. Thus, some of the recommendations made included the continued international cooperation in defeating the pandemic through vaccine development for a more healthy population and budget restructuring for developing countries to focus only on priority projects aimed at revamping productive economic activities for employment creation.