International examples of lowering unemployment and/or maintaining a low unemployment rate

Sibusiso Gumbi (National Treasury) presented on a SA-TIED working paper – this presentation reviews how selected countries lowered or sustained low unemployment: Germany, Finland and Russia among high-income economies, and China, Indonesia and Mexico among upper-middle-income ones. Common lessons include expanding high-productivity and digital services, supporting self-employment and informal work, balancing wage flexibility with worker protection, improving access to jobs, and rigorously evaluating labour-market programmes, while acknowledging the hard quantity-versus-quality and protection-versus-flexibility trade-offs involved. Presented at the 2026 Public Economics Conference.