Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
“The youth unemployment rate has reached its highest level on record,” says an International Labor Organization report, and the rate will rise through the year. At the launch of International Youth Day, the ILO Global Employment Trends for Youth 2010 says “81 million youth” in a total of “some 620 million economically active youth aged 15 to 24 years were unemployed at the end of 2009.” This figure is the highest ever.
Consequences
Down the road, the report warns, as new waves of youth join the already unemployed, the world will face “a crisis legacy, a ‘lost generation’” of youth labor-market dropouts who have “lost all hope of being able to work for a decent living.”
Idleness in substantive work among youth means, “Societies lose their investment in education. Governments fail to receive contributions to social security systems and are coerced to increase spending on remedial services.”
Relentless Poverty
The ILO report estimates that 152 million young people (about 28 percent of all the young workers in the world) worked but remained in extreme poverty in households [trying to survive] on less than $1.25 (U.S.) per person per day in 2008.
ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said, “In developing countries, crisis pervades the daily life of the poor [and] the effects of the economic and financial crisis threaten to exacerbate the pre-existing decent work deficits among youth.” Consequentially “the number of young people stuck in working poverty grows and the cycle of working poverty persists through at least another generation.”
In developed and some emerging economies, the crisis impact on youth is felt mainly in terms of rising unemployment and the social hazards associated with discouragement and prolonged inactivity. In the lower income countries, the impact of the crisis is felt more in shorter hours and reduced wages for the few who maintain wage and salaried employment and in rising vulnerable employment in an ‘increasingly crowded’ informal economy.
Global youth labor-market trends
Youth unemployment increased by 7.8 million: 1.1 million in 2007/08 and 6.7 million in 2008/09. In the ten-year period prior to the current crisis (1996/97 to 2006/07), the number of unemployed youth increased, on average, by 191,000 per year.
Youth unemployment rate rose from 11.9 to 13.0 per cent between 2007 and 2009. Between 2008 and 2009, the rate increased by 1 percentage point, marking the largest annual change over the 20 years of available global estimates and reversing the pre-crisis trend of declining youth unemployment rates since 2002.
The number of unemployed youth ─ between 2008 and 2009 ─ increased by 9.0 percent, compared to a 14.6 percent increase in the number of unemployed adults. However, in terms of unemployment rates, the impact on youth has proven to be greater than that of adults. The youth rate over 2008/09 increased by 1.0 percentage point compared to 0.5 points for the adult rate.
Young people in 2008 accounted for 24 per cent of the world’s working poor, versus 18.1 percent of total global employment.
Female youth unemployment rate in 2009 stood at 13.2 percent compared to the male rate of 12.9 per cent (a gap of 0.3 percentage point, the same gender gap seen in 2007).Somavia says the crisis offers “an opportunity to reassess strategies for addressing the serious disadvantages that young people face as they enter the labor market. It is important to focus on comprehensive and integrated strategies that combine education and training policies with targeted employment policies for youth.”
Sources and notes
“Global employment trends for youth, 2010 - world economic crisis has spurred a record increase in youth unemployment says ILO,” August 12,2010, http://www.ilocarib.org.tt/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1404&Itemid=368
ILO Reported Regional trends:
In Developed Economies and the European Union between 2008 and 2009, youth unemployment rates rose by 4.6 percentage points. The youth unemployment rate of 17.7 percent in 2009 in the Developed Economies and European Union is the highest the region has seen since regional estimates have been available (since 1991).
In Central and South-Eastern Europe (non-EU) and CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States], youth unemployment rates rose by 3.5 points.
In some countries, including Spain and the United Kingdom, there was an increase in inactivity among youth in the crisis years. This implies an increase in discouragement, whereby growing unemployment has led some young people to give up the job search.
Young women in most regions continued to be the hardest hit by unemployment. Only in the Developed Economies and European Union were young males harder hit: the increase in the male youth unemployment rate between 2007 and 2009 was 6.8 percentage points compared to 3.9 points for young women.
In developing economies, the crisis adds to the ranks of vulnerable employment and informal sector employment. There is supporting evidence of such an increase in Latin America where between 2008 and 2009 the number of own-account workers increased by 1.7 per cent and the number of contributing family workers by 3.8 per cent. The region also experienced an increase in the share of teenagers engaged in informal-sector employment during the crisis.
For almost all regions, there are forecasts of slight improvements compared with the peak unemployment years (2010 in most cases).In today’s news Deutsche Welle reported, “UN labor report shows drastic increase in youth unemployment,” August 12, 2010, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5895285,00.html
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