210 Million Jobless, 440 Million Jobs Needed: ILO/IMF

The job market needs loose monetary policy, more monetary stimulus measures and a phasing out of support for the unemployed, the International Labor Organization and the International Monetary Fund outlined at their joint conference in Oslo Monday.

Getty Images

The conference is looking for ways to reduce the number of unemployed people, now estimated at 210 million globally.

The ILO and IMF also estimate that 30 million jobs have been lost due to the financial crisis and another 440 million will need to be created over the next decade as the global population keeps growing.

Stimulus spending -- and when to cut it -- is dominating the economic debate at the moment and the boss of the ILO said we need a balanced solution.

"The question is how soon and how fast," Juan Somavia, the director general of the ILO told CNBC on Monday. "The feeling that many are having is that if you do it too fast and too soon this very weak recovery in which we're in is probably going to be affected."

Frugal Government, Fewer Unemployed?

Germany, which has seen unemployment fall to a 14-month low on the back of an export boom, believes its response to the crisis has been better than most.

"We invested more, we incurred additional debt spending, but we combined it with a tri-partite approach.," Germany Labor Minister Ralf Brauksiepe told CNBC. "That means at the center there where short-time working regulations and this meant the state invested money, but also the trade unions and workers renounced that money and the employers were willing to incur further costs."

The German response to the crisis was helped by the frugal nature of both the government and the people before the crisis hit, Brauksiepe said.

"German public households were not suffering from debts, from private debts," he added. "I think this was one problem in the US, we didn't have this problem. So German domestic spending was more or less stable."

-- Watch the full interview with Ralf Brauksiepe

Norway, which is hosting today's conference on jobs, has policies similar to Germany's and, with lots of oil and one of the lowest unemployment rates on the planet, has the following advice for the rest of the world.

"The most important thing we have done is that we have a very close cooperation with parties in the labor market, the trade unions and employees' organizations and through that we've managed the economy in a responsible way and kept wage increases down," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told CNBC.

Spotlight on Youth

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said "there is a time when you have to withdraw (stimulus) support," but did not say if now was the right time or not.

"Growth is coming back," Lagarde said. "As far as France is concerned, we are likely to have a least 1.5 percent growth this year, maybe a little more than that. So it’s time to focus the stimulus on what matters for the future, so strategic investments are in order."

-- Watch the full interview with Christine Lagarde and Jens Stoltenberg

In addition, Lagarde said that it's necessary to focus on youth unemployment.

One "of the things we have to focus on is avoid the lost generation, the wasted generation, the talents that would be available and not used in the economy," she said. "So we have to focus on young people. We have to make sure that the apprenticeship systems that we have in place actually take them from school, universities, training centers to the job market, which is currently a difficult issue and I think that is one of the most important things that we can discuss today."