Chapter 7 Conclusion

In summary, we look into matrices related to the job market, specifically, unemployment rate and labor participation rate, through population structure, economic factors, and education, trying to identify characteristics that distinguish developed countries and developing countries. We started by defining a GDP per capita of 12,000 dollars as the cut off for developing states. Looking into the population structure by age, we can observe that developing countries have the potential to have a growing size of available-to-work population, while developed countries are less advantageous since they have larger proportion of older people. If we divide the population by gender, one unanimity across all countries is the higher labor participation rate of male than that of female, and the gap is stunning for countries like Japan and India. Our exploration also confirms that higher level of education as well as higher literacy rate is associated with higher rate of employment across all countries. As you can probably imagine, the employment rate for high level of education is more steady across all years, more turbulent for lower levels especially for developing countries. When we put this issue to a larger scale and look into it through the lens of world economy, we assumed that higher imports or lower exports meant negative correlation with employment for reasons like out souring. However, we observed that the labor force contribution maintains at a consistent level across years while the imports have ups and downs; therefore, there is no obvious association. By exploring categories of import/export products, we found that high technology exports are positively correlated with labor participation rate. Based on the result, some patterns such as gender gaps are shared across all countries, but the degree of obviousness of a particular pattern could vary between countries. No particular pattern can separate developed countries from developing countries, which reveals the complexity of the issue and uniqueness of the situation faced by different countries.