Youth unemployment rate yet to recover from financial crash, reports ILO
The global youth unemployment rate has stabilized but remains significantly higher than before the financial crisis, according to the latest figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO).
According to the 2015 edition of the ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth report, the global unemployment rate among people aged 15 to 24 remained at around 13% last year, as the number of unemployed youth fell but the young workforce as a whole also shrank. In 2007, immediately prior to the financial crisis, the figure was 11.7%.
There is also noticeable regional variation. Among the developed economies, the youth unemployment rate fell by 1.4 percentage points compared to 2012. There was a smaller decrease in non-EU European countries, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa; while the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East saw an increase in the unemployment rate.
The ILO also reported youth unemployment increases in China (where the youth unemployment rate stands at 10.6%, projected to rise to over 11% in 2016), and Brazil (where the rate averaged 15.8% in the first two quarters of 2015, up from 14% or less over the past three years).
Sara Elder, the lead author of the report, said that: “It is encouraging to see an improvement in the youth employment trends […] But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that recovery is not universal and that almost 43% of the global youth labour force is still either unemployed or working yet living in poverty. It’s still not easy to be young and starting out in today’s labour market.”
Our author David Lam has written about the relationship between the youth population bulge and youth unemployment, arguing that: “While policymakers should understand the demography of youth labor markets, they should not expect that declining youth cohorts can take the place of policies such as education and labor market flexibility that will more directly improve youth labor markets.”
René Böheim has also looked at the effect that early retirement has on youth unemployment. He writes that: “increasing effective retirement ages and policies to foster employment of older workers are likely to support the employment of both older and younger workers. Policymakers, therefore, need not fear that such pension reforms will create problems for younger workers since, in all likelihood, increasing labor demand for one cohort will lead to more overall employment.”
Read more on this story at Reuters. The ILO’s report Global Employment Trends for Youth 2015 can be accessed here.
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