In theory, European unemployment will start falling in a meaningful, if not dramatic, manner this year as companies start to invest in manpower again after years of layoffs and hiring freezes to protect profits.
That is what politicians say, comfortable in the knowledge that economists largely share their expectation of an acceleration in economic growth, to near two per cent, which should start at last make inroads into unemployment.
But what of the risk of a "jobless recovery", where business picks up but jobs don't keep pace, where companies refuse to pay bigger wage bills because they face cheap-labour competition from China, or because they prefer to reward shareholders? And what of the outlook over the longer term when China and India, now developing at breakneck speed, account for more than one in three people on the planet?
"Today we're living a revolution," says Alain Chaille, head of southern Europe for courier company FedEx.
He predicts global shifts in trade and production on a scale that will pitch the "comfort zone" of labour in Western Europe into direct competition with developing nations where people work for a relative pittance or unions are banned.
The optimistic view is that stronger European economic growth will bring more jobs. The European Commission says growth will rise to 1.9 per cent in the euro zone and 2.1 per cent in the EU as a whole this year, from 1.3 and 1.5 per cent respectively in 2005.
Unemployment, the Commission predicts, will decline to 8.4 per cent from 8.6 per cent in the euro zone as a whole and from 8.5 per cent from 8.7 in the EU.
Economists are encouraged by declines in unemployment in Germany and France, the biggest and third-biggest economies in Europe, but worry that Britain may be losing its edge as a far better performer on growth and jobs.
Politicians have to worry about the immediate future but they are also trying to get to grips with the decades ahead, so far with little agreement on what can be done.
For the past few decades, double-digit unemployment has been the scourge across most of a region which gave no thought to all-out trade competition with China when Deng Xiaoping began his reforms the late 1970s.
Andre Sapir, a Belgian economist invited to brief ministers from the world's leading industrial powers in London last year, argued that Europe has no choice but to reform its labour markets if it wants to survive in a globalised world. That means choosing whether to adopt a largely unregulated Anglo-American model or the high-tax Nordic model, or a hybrid of the two.
The British economy is characterised by weak trade unions, low unemployment, low job protection and a larger number of low-wage earners - what Mr Sapir describes as a market that scores low on fairness and high on efficiency.
The Nordic model followed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands is characterised by hefty state welfare provision and intervention in the labour market, strong unions, less wildly varying wage structures and low unemployment.