Mass unemployment the new normal in SE Asia

A new International Labor Organization report suggests that more than one in six young people worldwide has stopped working since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the rest have seen their working hours cut by almost a quarter.

In Southeast Asia, unemployment rates have spiked to almost unprecedented levels because of the pandemic, which has devastated economies to varying degrees. Until now, official unemployment rates in the region have been enviably low.

Before 2020, Cambodia’s unemployment rates had barely risen above the 2% mark since the early 1990s, while Vietnam’s had also been consistently at less than 2%, according to data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). For the last decade, Thailand’s jobless rate has hovered around 0.6%.