Employment for Youth: A Growing Challenge for the Global Community

Social and economic challenges facing young people today must be understood in terms of the complex interaction between unique demographic trends and specific economic contexts. There has been an unprecedented growth in the number of young people in the Global South in the past two decades, and these youth face situations where the forces of economic globalization interact with historically determined national and regional economic structures and policies. Although we will argue that unemployment is only a partial measure of employment inadequacy for youth, especially in poor countries, its ready availability and widespread use make it an important starting point. While we strive to take a global perspective on youth employment challenges, our focus in this paper is on the developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We focus primarily on youth ages 15 through 24 but sometimes also consider 25- to 29-year-olds because there is growing evidence that the transition to adulthood, including the transition to work, is now more protracted and extends into these higher ages. We argue in this paper that employment inadequacy among youth is a much broader phenomenon than youth unemployment as conventionally defined. Remaining out of work to actively search for employment is often either fruitless and/or unaffordable for many youths in developing countries if there are few wage and salary jobs to be had. After attempting to characterize the dimensions of the youth employment challenge, we move to a brief review of existing attempts to address the youth employment challenge. We focus in this discussion on education and training programs that prepare youth for the labor market and active labor market programs that help them transition into the world of work. We attempt to synthesize the implications and lessons learned from rigorous evaluations of such programs. Although these programs are fairly widespread, most of the evaluations and assessments that have been carried out so far have been done for programs implemented in upper- and middle income countries. The applicability of these lessons learned to poor countries is therefore still a work in progress. Commissioned paper for the High-Level Panel on Post-2015 UN MDG Development Agenda Employment and Economic Growth Minnesota Population Center Working Paper Series