Dr. Hamad Kasasbeh

Why do some countries succeed in achieving sustained growth, reducing unemployment, and improving living standards even though they possess neither exceptional natural resources nor vast domestic markets? And why do others continue to struggle despite substantial spending on projects, education, and employment programs? Economic thought has offered important answers involving investment, productivity, human capital, technology, and institutional quality. All are indispensable to understanding economic strength. Yet the growing complexity of modern economies raises an additional question: Are all jobs equally capable of converting resources and investment into growth, employment, and better lives?

Every job has social and economic value, but jobs do not have the same breadth of impact. Some produce a specific good or service, with their direct effect largely confined to the institution in which they exist. Others influence many sectors at once. A modern economy is not a collection of separate institutions; it is an interconnected network in which every link depends on the efficiency of others. When a pivotal point in that network underperforms, the cost does not remain local. It spreads across production, investment, trade, employment, and prices.

This is clearly visible in customs clearance and logistics. Improving these functions does more than raise the efficiency of ports and border crossings. It shortens the time needed for raw materials to arrive, reduces storage costs, helps manufacturers meet delivery schedules, and strengthens exporters’ competitiveness. The same is true of payment systems, data analysis, specialized maintenance, cybersecurity, and supply-chain management. Such jobs may not be the largest in number or the most visible, but they occupy positions from which their impact extends to thousands of firms, workers, and consumers.

This leads to the concept of critical jobs: roles whose value is not limited to what they produce directly, but extends to the capacity they give the rest of the economy to function and grow. A critical job removes a bottleneck, saves time, lowers cost, improves a decision, or reconnects parts of the economy that were operating inefficiently. A role is not critical simply because demand for it is high, nor because it carries greater status than others. It is critical because improving or weakening it creates a multiplier effect across many sectors. Its importance therefore depends on its position within the economy, not merely on the number of people employed in it.

This perspective does not replace the concepts of investment, productivity, or human capital. It helps direct them more precisely. When resources are limited, it is not enough to ask how much is spent on training, how many projects are financed, or how many vacancies are announced. The more important question is where resources should be placed to generate the widest impact. Training a relatively small number of people for a high-impact role may deliver greater value than large programs disconnected from productive needs. Likewise, improving an economic procedure or logistics service may have more effect than an expensive project that removes no genuine obstacle to business growth.

This perspective is especially important in a resource-constrained economy such as Jordan’s, where public and private resources cannot be distributed equally across every priority. The challenge is not only to secure more resources, but to increase the effect of every dinar spent, every skill developed, and every investment implemented. Critical jobs can help identify the points where improvement would raise the performance of several sectors at once, whether in industry, agriculture, tourism, technology, or services. A resource-limited country may not be able to compete through the scale of its spending, but it can compete through the quality of its choices and the precision with which investment is directed.

This lens also invites a reconsideration of how unemployment is addressed. The problem is not solved sustainably by finding a temporary position for an unemployed person, nor by increasing employment in low-productivity activities. It is solved by building the jobs that make the economy itself more capable of employing people. A role that helps a company expand, reach a new market, lower production costs, or manage information more effectively does not provide income to one person alone. It increases the company’s capacity to hire others. In this way, a single job becomes a starting point for additional employment opportunities.

This is the difference between managing unemployment and building employment capacity. The first looks for jobs that can absorb people in the short term. The second builds an economy that generates jobs continuously. This does not mean disregarding urgent employment programs or labor-intensive activities. Rather, such measures become more effective when they are connected to a productive system capable of continuing and expanding. Sustainable employment is not created by an administrative decision alone. It emerges when firms have a sound economic reason to grow, when expansion becomes less costly, when markets become broader, and when available skills are more closely aligned with business needs.

The effects ultimately reach people’s living standards. When the jobs that keep the economy moving become more efficient, the cost of doing business falls, the quality of services improves, and firms become more able to compete and invest. When rising productivity is accompanied by business expansion and fair competition, growth is more likely to be reflected in household income, job stability, service quality, and the prices paid by consumers. Improving living standards therefore does not always begin with higher spending or wages in isolation. It may begin with repairing the functions and positions that determine the efficiency of the entire economy.

The concept also requires a reassessment of the relationship between education and the labor market. The question is no longer simply how many graduates are produced each year, but what capabilities the economy needs in order to grow and create better jobs. An economy may have a surplus in some specializations while simultaneously facing shortages in a small number of roles essential to the expansion of entire sectors. Universities, vocational institutes, and training institutions must therefore go beyond responding to today’s vacancies. They need to help build the capabilities the economy will require in the future and connect their outputs to the points where value and employment opportunities are created.

The critical jobs economy does not seek to rank people or professions by importance. It seeks to rank economic priorities by impact. It adds a simple but decisive question to economic planning: Which jobs, when strengthened, make other jobs more productive, investments more efficient, and the economy more capable of creating opportunity? In a context such as Jordan’s, the question cannot remain merely: How many jobs have we created? It must become: How many jobs have we built that can open the way to new businesses, better wages, and more secure lives? Countries do not advance through the number of jobs alone, but through their ability to identify the jobs that enable the entire economy to work better.