The Future of Work: Challenges for Job Creation Due to Global Demographic Change and Automation

We explore future job creation needs under conditions of demographic, economic, and technological change. First, we estimate the implications for job creation in 2020–2030 of population growth, changes in labor force participation, and the achievement of plausible target unemployment rates, disaggregated by age and gender. Second, we analyze the job creation needs differentiated by country income group. Finally, we examine how accelerated automation could affect job creation needs over the coming decades. Overall, shifting demographics, changing labor force participation rates, reductions in unemployment to the target levels of 8 percent for youth and 4 percent for adults, and automation combine to require the creation of approximately 340 million jobs in 2020–2030.