The words like an infectious disease, virus, or even an epidemic can describes unemployment. We need to focus on the transmission mechanism of unemployment, its macroeconomic behaviour, and socioeconomic impact.
An impacting patterns are reveal while examining the data as it changes over the time.
Firstly, even cycle of business at it’s peak level, increased unemployment levels in communities across the countries are seen countlessly. These communities continue to be forced in recession even though the countries at much doing good in economic activities.
Secondly, the national unemployment number figures indicated by the countries are much underrepresent than actual joblessness as economic enters a recession.
Thirdly, depression level unemployment rates are experience across the countries as since the official numbers vastly underrepresent the actual employment rate.
Fourthly, identifiable geographic pattern of the evolution seen in unemployment over time.
A regionally affected mass layoffs areas drastically increasing its spread in unemployment and these affected area radius growths convert into recession. Mass layoffs in distressed community produce high employment rates in surrounding areas. As the economy gets evolves with betterment, unemployment rates show its discernible percentage of decline. But the core affected geographical area never reaches on full recovery. In other words, the data show that unemployment is not only persistent, but when mass layoffs take place, the effect transmits quite rapidly. Put simply, one unemployed person throws another one out of work. This pattern suggests that unemployment behaves much more like a virus or an infectious disease than a random shock event. Not only does it propagate in a specific geographic pattern, but it also inflicts severe consequences on individuals and communities.
A permanent loss in earnings over a lifetime occur due to a spell of individual unemployment. The unemployed are getting health hazards and spend more money on health care costs. They suffer from increasing rates of alcoholism, physical illness, depression, and anxiety, make more trips to the doctor and take more medication. These multifaceted health effects create a vicious cycle that prevents the unemployed from re-entering the labour market. Since there are chronic job shortages, medical interventions alone would not be adequate. Even if one manages to escape the “unemployment–ill health” trap, he/she will likely slip back into it if the job opportunities are not there. Unemployment does not just affect the unemployed, it also harms their children and families. It is a causal factor in malnutrition and growth stunting, and negatively impacts the mental health of spouses and children. Children’s educational attainment, labour market outcomes, and social mobility are also negatively affected. This is not just the case in any individual country but also around the world.
Unemployment is a direct and indirect contributor to inequality. It increases the general level of income inequality in most countries’ region and leads to greater inequality within labour and between labour and capital. The social exclusion produced by unemployment exacerbates interracial and interethnic tensions and antisocial and criminal behaviour. Additionally finds a negative impact on technological change, innovation, and output. Unemployment is a contributing factor to financial crises and economic instability, as well as social and political instability, human trafficking, exploitation, and slavery.
Epidemiologists speak of a three- steps approach to tackling epidemics: 1) identification; 2) containment; and 3) inoculation. The first is identifying the origins of the infectious agent. In the case of unemployment, the data on mass layoffs and reports the hotspots that tend to experience ongoing high levels of joblessness at the state, county, metropolitan, and city level. The second is examining the transmission and propagation mechanism, and devising methods for containment. Local area data paint a clear picture of the regional dissemination of joblessness. A spatial study of unemployment may be particularly useful if it is mapped against other forms of social and economic deprivation (such as limited access to decent food, housing, education, health services, and transportation) and can suggest ways to address these multiple problems in concert. The final strategy involves designing interventions that rest on two key features – preparedness and prevention. It will be continued in next edition Article.
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