|
|
|
  |
| Sunday, 23 January 2005 |
 |
|
 |
World |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Job loss could aggravate Asia's urbanisation woes: ILO KOBE, Japan, Saturday (AFP) The International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned on Saturday that the massive job loss caused by Asia's tsunamis would aggravate urbanization and pose a "new social threat" unless reconstruction moves forward smoothly. The ILO has estimated the calamity swept away about one million jobs in Indonesia and Sri Lanka alone and sent the unemployment rate soaring in the worst affected areas. The UN body also forecast that reconstruction could let 50 to 60 percent of people who lost their jobs earn a living again by December and 85 percent by the end of 2006. However, the prediction assumes that the recovery goes smoothly and local people are engaged in construction work, said Alfredo Lazarte-Hoyle, director of an ILO focus programme on crisis response and reconstruction. "Many of these people who are not going to find alternative sources of work are going to migrate to the capitals or major cities," Lazarte-Hoyle told a news conference on the final day of a United Nations conference on disaster reduction here. The inflow would be "enlarging the state of poverty around there and enforcing a new social threat," the ILO official said. "We hope that is not going to happen." According to a report presented at the UN conference, the December 26 tsunami disaster took jobs from some 600,000 people in Indonesia and more than 400,000 in Sri Lanka. As a result, the jobless rate in Indonesia's affected areas may have increased to 30 percent from 6.8 percent before the disaster, while the unemployment rate in Sri Lankan affected provinces rising to 20 percent from 9.2 percent beforehand. |
|
| News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
| Produced by Lake House |
