Over the past few weeks, both the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, and the President of the World Bank Group, Ajay Banga, published important articles diagnosing the state of labor markets, the future of jobs, and the challenges they face.
اضافة اعلان
The IMF Managing Director focused on the impact of artificial intelligence on market dynamics, emphasizing the supply side, skills, and technological transformation. Meanwhile, the World Bank President addressed the risks of a looming jobs gap over the next fifteen years, projecting that the gap could reach around 800 million jobs, as approximately 1.2 billion young people enter the labor market, while the global economy is expected to generate only about 400 million jobs.
The warnings of the two leaders of the institutions are serious and grounded in real data. Georgieva points out that nearly 40 percent of jobs globally are exposed to AI-driven changes, and that the ability to update skills or acquire new ones will become a fundamental condition for maintaining employment. She calls for reforming education systems, investing in lifelong learning, strengthening social protection, and ensuring market competitiveness.
On the other hand, Banga proposes a three-pillar job creation strategy centered on investing in human and physical infrastructure, creating a business-friendly environment, and supporting private sector expansion, with a focus on labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture, primary healthcare, tourism, infrastructure, and value-added manufacturing.
From a diagnostic standpoint, the two visions appear complementary: the first addresses the quality of jobs and the skills required in the context of digital transformation, while the second tackles their quantity in light of demographic pressures. However, the fundamental question for us, citizens of the Global South, and particularly the Middle East and North Africa region is: to what extent are these recommendations consistent with the actual policies that the two institutions have promoted in our countries for decades, and continue to promote?
The interventions of the IMF and the World Bank, as the most influential economic institutions shaping our economies have played a central role in redesigning the role of the state. They have encouraged, and in many cases compelled, our governments to withdraw from economic activity and limit themselves to a regulatory role that serves private sector interests, particularly those of transnational corporations. This has been accompanied by systematic pressure on social policies through austerity programs targeting wages, social protections, and labor policies, weakening governments’ ability to sustain social protection systems and reduce poverty. Policies have thus shifted from addressing the root causes of poverty to merely managing its consequences.
In her article, the IMF Managing Director focuses on the supply side, skills, education, and readiness for digital transformation. Yet in practice, the IMF often overlooks demand-side policies that stimulate inclusive growth and expand employment opportunities. Fiscal contraction policies and pressure on wages weaken domestic consumer demand, one of the most important drivers of job creation. Moreover, facilitating borrowing, even on relatively concessional terms, has plunged our countries into a spiral of escalating debt, such that annual debt servicing allocations in many countries now exceed spending on education and health, the very sectors both articles call for investing in.
The paradox is that the warning about the jobs gap and skills mismatch is fundamentally correct, yet the policies implemented on the ground move in the opposite direction. When governments are required to reduce public spending, freeze hiring and wages, and cut sustainable social support, how can they seriously invest in quality education, technical training, or infrastructure capable of generating large-scale employment opportunities?
Furthermore, education policies in most countries of the region reinforce social inequality. The expansion of private higher education and its rising costs have made quality education, capable of preparing young people to benefit from digital transformation and AI, a privilege of higher-income groups. Lower-income groups remain trapped in under-resourced public education systems, deepening social divides and economic inequality. Thus, the discourse about readiness for AI becomes an elite narrative that does not reflect the reality of the majority.
More troubling is the tendency among some experts within the two institutions to close their ears to perspectives from the Global South. Many studies prepared by national experts and civil society organizations are ignored or underestimated, and at best listened to without being translated into policy. As a result, a narrow accounting and financial perspective often overrides social and rights-based considerations, particularly among IMF experts, so that a country’s “financial and monetary stability” is measured by deficit and inflation figures, rather than by the economy’s ability to generate decent jobs or reduce poverty and inequality.
There is no doubt that what the IMF Managing Director and the World Bank President warn about is real: a massive jobs gap and a profound technological transformation that could exacerbate labor market challenges. But if the policies imposed on our countries remain unchanged, they will undermine the very conditions that both articles identify as necessary for the future of work.
What is required is not only reforming education or supporting skills development, but rethinking the development model itself: a model that balances financial and monetary stability with social justice; the role of the private sector with the role of the state; and market requirements with labor rights. Otherwise, the question will not be whether we are ready for AI or for the jobs gap, but who will pay the price of economic stability when it is achieved at the expense of people and their rights.
