(Credit: WSDOT, Flickr Creative Commons)

Creating 100 million jobs in developing countries will require outrageous ambition, as I discussed in my blog post in April about the Competitive Industries Practice’s work with our clients. Since then, the world’s jobs challenge has become no less severe. If anything, the outlook has worsened.

In India, where I’m based, the economic outlook has continued to deteriorate. Industrial output did not just stop growing in the last quarter: It shrank by about 1 percent. In the country with, by far, the largest number of new workers entering the global labor pool, the engine of job creation is not just stalled: It may be going in reverse. Across the developing world, including in East Asia, the last six months have seen growth slowdowns and setbacks in job creation. The slow recovery in the developed world is not reducing unemployment quickly enough, if at all.

So as we prepare to return from our summer vacations, this is a good time for World Bank staff to think about how to do things differently and how to take the lead in tackling the jobs crisis. What will it take for Competitive Industries to help our clients and counterparts deliver under these difficult circumstances?

It clearly can’t be done by the CI practice alone. Implementing solutions – fast – requires working across traditional sectors, at full speed.