Labour market access – a persistent challenge for youth around the world

The fifth issue of our series Spotlight on work statistics uses the first ever global estimates of youth not in employment, education or training along with other youth labour market indicators to explore the situation of youth in labour markets around the world, and unveil the additional challenges they face.
© Marcel Crozet / ILO
© Marcel Crozet / ILO

The situation of youth in the labour market and the economy has a great impact on the community as a whole: today’s youth are the cornerstone of tomorrow’s society. The education, skills and professional experience gained in their youth determine how well equipped they will be for this.

Over one fifth of the world's youth are idle, in the sense that they are not actively participating in the labour market by having a job or acquiring new skills in educational or training programmes, which prompts a call to urgent action to improve youth’s access to decent jobs and capacity building.
Young women are more than twice as likely as young men to be jobless and not in the educational system: they face additional difficulties to access the labour market, pursue quality education, and participate in vocational or skills training programmes, while they also participate more in unpaid work.
In all regions the share of young women not in employment, education or training is higher than that of young men, but the gap is the most striking in the Arab States and in Asia and the Pacific.
Progress has been marginal: the share of youth NEET stood at 21% in 2018, compared to 22% in 2008. The picture is just as grim in terms of addressing the specific vulnerailities of young women.
Employment creation is a key factor for the healthy functioning of labour markets. The number of employed adults in the world has grown uninterruptedly since 2001, while youth employment is decreasing since 2008. This is a reflection of demographic trends (the ageing of the population), but even more so, of the inclemency of labour markets towards young workers. In fact, the global jobs crisis of 2009 affected youth to a much higher degree than adults.
Unsurprisingly, youth have a much higher inactivity rate than adults (it is expected that many youth would be in education, often full-time, thus remaining outside the labour force). However, their unemployment rate is three times the adult unemployment rate.
The unemployment rate conveys the share of persons in the labour force who are jobless but available and actively looking for a job. Thus, it does not capture jobless persons interested in employment but who quit the job search due to discouragement or other reasons, or who are not immediately available to take up a job. The combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force complements the unemployment rate by incorporating persons in those situations. The difference between these two indicators is higher for youth than for adults in all regions, meaning that in addition to unemployment, youth face severe difficulties in accessing platforms for job search or suffer from lack of job search infrastructure or are subject to issues of availability for employment due to other responsibilities.
Youth in the world are over-represented in unemployment and the potential labour force (compared to their share in the working-age population), which reaffirms the additional hardships of youth to access employment. Although some progress has been seen in the past decade (the over-representation of youth in unemployment compared to the working-age population has slightly decreased), it remains modest and slow, pointing to the need for urgent action by policymakers.
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Author

  • Rosina Gammarano

    Rosina is an Economist in the Data Production and Analysis Unit of the ILO Department of Statistics, currently seconded to the UN Resident Coordinator’s team in Mexico. In the ILO, she was the focal point on SDG labour market indicators and a recurrent author for Spotlight on Work Statistics. Passionate about addressing inequality and gender issues, she is now sharing her expertise with the UN Mexico office.

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