Youth employment in various countries

Made by Kulyan Adra

Employment in various countries

• The aim of the project: to analyze the Youth employment outcomes in some developed countries in the perspective of a life-long career.
• Competences developed: intercultural-communicative; profession-orientated (information-research,reflective-developing)
• Project outcome: a project work; a graph.

Youth employment and development

• A youth focus within the employment and development debate, including the post-2015 agenda, is warranted for a number of key reasons:
• Early work experience affects work and wellbeing throughout a person’s life.

• Youth employment outcomes have spillovers across society, affecting social and political stability, and to future generations.
• Today’s youth population is the largest the world has ever seen. The size of the challenge and economic burden is therefore unprecedented.
• Vulnerable groups of youth stand to lose out in today’s environment of fierce competition for scarce jobs, exacerbating inequality within current youth cohorts.
• The school-to-work transition of young people has to be analysed taking into account of parallel key early life transitions, including cohabitation, marriage and childbearing.

Youth in unemployment and vulnerable employment (% of youth labour force)

Main challenges

• Youth employment outcomes are affected by three groups of determinants:

Youth population (in thousands)

Youth unemployment rate (%), by region

NEET rate (% of youth) neither in employment nor in education or training

• Main challenges by region
• Latin America : Over half of the working youth in Latin America are in informal employment (against 30% of adults), and informality in wage employment is rising. Informality is highest among youth with primary education, but has recently increased fastest for highly educated youth, signalling a lack of formal private sector labour demand and a lack or mismatch of skills obtained in secondary and tertiary education (IDB 2012). Furthermore, NEET figures are particularly high in LA as compared with other regions. About one fifth of youth in Latin American countries is NEET, with NEET rates much higher for women than for men.

North Africa and Middle East

• With limits to public sector employment growth, the lack of jobs in productive private sector activities is a big demand side challenge for youth in North African and the Middle East.

The region has the world’s lowest private sector investment contribution to growth, and most investment is directed to capital- and low-skilled-labour-intensive sectors (Gatti et al. 2013, based on FDI data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and World Bank World Development Indicators). Private sector dynamism is harmed by inconsistent and unpredictable policy implementation and poor access to credit. Distorted input prices, due to energy and fuel subsidies, increase the relative cost of labour (Gatti et al. 2013).

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest youth population growth rate and the highest share of youth in the working age population. Still, the region’s youth employment problem should be seen in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. This is especially true in low-income countries and for the most vulnerable groups: young women, youth in rural areas, youth from poor families, and those with no or little education.

ASIA

• Most countries in South Asia have high vulnerable employment shares, informality, and working poverty. Despite high growth rates compared to other regions, a large share of workers remains in agriculture, in the urban informal sector or in informal jobs in formal enterprises. Employment growth in the formal sector is too low to absorb large numbers of young labour market entrants. Manufacturing still accounts for a low share of total output and employment, compared to other developing regions. This mostly affects low- and medium-skilled workers, who are still predominantly confined to working in agriculture and informal services (ILO 2013a).

Besides structural change towards more low-skilled intensive manufacturing production, increasing productivity in agricultural and informal activities is key to improving youth employment outcomes. South-East Asia has the world’s highest youth-to-adult ratio of the unemployment rate , because adult unemployment is very low (2.5% in 2011 according to ILO statistics) while youth unemployment is close to the world average (13% in 2011). There have been some positive developments in the Philippines and Indonesia, the two countries in the region with the largest labour force, with decreasing youth unemployment rates. The main challenge for South-East Asian countries is the poor quality of employment for the majority of workers, as in 2012 still more than 60 per cent of the region’s employed were estimated to be in vulnerable employment. Furthermore, in the countries where data is available, vulnerable employment rates for women remain significantly higher than for men (ILO 2013a).

Conclusion

• Although youth unemployment is probably the most visible aspect of the current youth employment crisis, the challenge for the majority of youth in developing countries is to improve the quality of employment rather than the quantity. With poverty reduction as the principal objective, policies need to have a specific focus on the most vulnerable groups of youth in low-income countries.
• However, keeping in mind the broader role of decent work in promoting social cohesion, development cooperation also needs to target the large group of the openly unemployed youth in middle-income countries. Young women are another key subgroup in employment-related strategies and interventions.
• It has to be acknowledged that programs aimed at improving youth employability risk having no or only limited impact in a low-growth environment. Improving youth employment outcomes requires a combination of targeted policies and programs for current youth cohorts with a longer-term strategy for stimulating employment-intensive growth. In most countries this will include reforms ranging from business and labour regulation to economic diversification and industrial and trade policies.