Transcript of Remarks by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at World Economic Forum Session: A Coming Jobs Challenge in Emerging Markets? 21 January 2026 at Congress Centre

Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum and moderator: I'm Saadia Zahidi, and absolutely delighted to invite two members of the Forum's Board of Trustees - the President of the Republic of Singapore and the President of the World Bank Group to share some framing thoughts from everything we have been hearing this week - technology, geopolitics, geoeconomics. All of it ties down to one key thing that we really care about, which is: livelihoods and jobs.

And that is what we are going to focus on now. So I'm going to start with President Banga. You have, of course, placed job creation at the very centre of your strategy. Please tell us more.

Ajay S. Banga, President, World Bank Group: President Tharman is my hero in many ways, and one of the reasons that we are having this conversation on jobs is because he was kind enough, despite his real role in Singapore, to make the effort to continue his drive towards caring about jobs for young people. That is actually the real framing.

It is about jobs for young people. Over the next 12 to 15 years, 1.2 billion young people in the emerging markets will become eligible for a job, in the sense that they will come to the age of 18. And yet those very same economies are currently projected to produce around 400 million jobs.

Now, we could be wrong. AI could change something, something else could change something. We are unlikely to be wrong by 800 million people. So the issue is that we have a real challenge here in terms of getting the right impetus for their growth, while at the same time, the real opportunity - that hope and optimism, and employed people, whether working for someone or entrepreneurs, that drive that energy, that optimism, that hope, and what it means for our grandchildren.

That is the topic of the day.

When I was thinking my way through this in the early part of my time in the World Bank Group, I had the chance to work with President Tharman in his prior roles, in my prior jobs, and I went and asked him if he would help me. He thought about it, came back to me very methodically, as he is, and said, "I will."

On the condition that we really do this with a drive to put effort and energy and money and capital to work. So the Jobs Council that he is heading for us has come back with some thoughts, and we will come to that topic.

But the principal topic is: you need infrastructure, both physical and human capital. You need the right policies for business to flourish, because it is in the private sector that jobs get created.

Government enables - even an outstanding government like Singapore enables the private sector in Singapore to create jobs. And then if you provide the right catalytic financing for that private sector, particularly micro and small enterprises, which is where the majority of jobs get created, then you create the virtual flywheel, the positive flywheel that you want.

Infrastructure and people being educated with the right policies, with the right financial services, and you start getting the job engine going. That is what we are here to discuss - the importance of that opportunity.

Moderator: Thank you very much. A very rapid follow-up question: specific sectors that you are focusing on.

Ajay Banga: The Jobs Council also deliberated a great deal about going to sectors where two things can be kept in mind.

One, we do not rely only on the outsourcing of jobs from the developed world to continue to be the primary source of job generation in the emerging markets, because I think the political and trade model and the geopolitics that you started your commentary with play in that space. So we are making a conscious decision not to get into that situation.

The second aspect was places where the impact of AI, the way it is being discussed, big AI, large language models, as compared to the way we are discussing it, which is small AI delivered at the edge on your computer or phone by local compute, can help farmers and healthcare workers and education workers do a better job.

Those two criteria were in our system. We came back to five sectors.

The first is infrastructure - construction, and what it enables.

The second is primary healthcare: the creation of a distributed network of physical and digital clinics, with nurses, medical diagnostic technicians and midwives connected to doctors, connected to regional hospitals. Think of that like a pyramid, which allows resources to be used efficiently, with technology to identify things a doctor can do that a nurse could not do.

Third is agriculture for small farmers, and this is a topic that matters greatly to both of us. He has done a lot of work in his life on this topic. I grew up in India. I am a son of Punjab, even though my father was an army officer, and I worked in Nestlé for the first few years of my life. We were based in Punjab, collecting milk from farmers.

The tragedy is farmers today do not want to be farmers, if they are micro-sized, they sell their farm and end up as urban poor. The objective is to make them access scalable pricing and commodities and technology and markets, and get them the benefit of scale which they otherwise lack.

Our fourth category is tourism, which, done well, creates the most jobs per dollar invested. And the fifth category is value-added manufacturing - by which I mean no longer just extraction, but a degree of local processing to create quality jobs in those countries.

Moderator: Thank you very much. And President Tharman, you are, of course, co-chairing the Jobs Council at the World Bank, and you have also been a very strong champion of this entire work around the future of jobs here at the World Economic Forum. Your perspective on this topic to set us up for the conversation.

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Let me just follow on from what Ajay said. If we turn from the geopolitics of the day, and ask ordinary people around the world what their main concerns in life are, what is on the minds of most people is the need for security and growth in their careers. Not necessarily the same job, but the security of a career, growth through their lives, and the dignity of knowing that they are able to contribute.

Increasingly too, in societies that are getting older, they are concerned about their retirement years, but their retirement years depend too on their years at work.

So if we start with what's on the minds of most people, jobs must therefore be a central priority.

And there is so much more that can be done to create jobs and better jobs in the developing world, to start with by taking lessons from what has already worked in some parts of the world.

I do not want to oversell the East Asian story, but job creation has worked relatively well in several countries in East Asia. First, in human capital development. And I do not just mean schools, but starting much further upstream - in early childhood development, and in fact starting with in-utero nutrition. What India is now doing in its aspirational districts, and its 'anganwadi' centres in villages and their focus on maternal and child health, is critical. These early-stage investments have the largest multipliers over a lifetime - all the studies show that.

Coming to the education system, we still have around the world, and in East Asia too, an overly academic education system. It's true for the most advanced countries as well. It should not be an either-or choice of an academic or more technical education. It has to be about providing pathways for everyone to ascend and excel through the pathway that matches their interests and capabilities.

We have to reduce the hierarchy that still exists - all over the world and especially in Asia - between those on the academic path and those on the technical and vocational path. And the way to address that is to provide real opportunities to excel and attain mastery within the technical and vocational and applied paths. We have to develop that - and that is actually what we are focused on in Singapore.

Then we go on downstream, to the growth strategies that Ajay was talking about. Some of the strategies that we adopted in East Asia are still relevant for South Asia and Africa, but have more limited potential than in the past.

First, manufacturing is now much more a story of technology, and increasingly about advanced robotics and AI. But its potential for job creation in the developing world has not disappeared. If you look at China today, or middle-income countries like Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia and some others, there is still a lot of manufacturing that is not top-end, high-skill manufacturing.

China has moved up to very high skill levels, but it is still doing a lot of traditional low-end manufacturing using advanced equipment. If part of that can be decanted to Africa and South Asia - it is already being decanted to places like Tamil Nadu in India - it can create a big lift in manufacturing employment. As China addresses its domestic imbalances, including its overproduction of manufacturing goods, there is scope for decanting more of that production to other parts of the developing world.

Second, the green transition presents a major opportunity for job creation in the developing world.

Africa and South Asia are rich in solar, wind, hydro and thermal, and they could be sites for energy-intensive production for the world, apart from their own regional markets.

The studies show that the number of jobs created by a dollar of investment in renewable energy is some three times higher than in fossil fuels. This is not an ideological question, or of fossil fuel versus renewable industry interests. The question in regions that are critically short of jobs is - where can we generate the most jobs?

This is a real opportunity that did not exist at the time East Asia took off: the opportunity to create a range of jobs - unskilled, semi-skilled and high-skilled - through the transition to renewable energy.

Moderator:
Thank you for laying out the challenge, and thank you for sharing some inspiration before we get into the conversation on meeting this 800-million job challenge.