TUAC NEWS
Invest in youth to tackle jobs crisis, says OECD
12/12/2010
The global economy is recovering but youth unemployment is getting worse, according to a new OECD report. Off to a Good Start? Jobs for Youth, the concluding report of the OCED activity on Jobs for Youth, which focused on 16 member countries, says that young people are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as the average worker. Yet few governments are taking proactive steps to boost youth employment.
The global crisis has hit youth hard...
The report reveals that the global economic crisis hit youth very hard. In the two years to the second quarter of 2010, unemployment among young people aged 15-24 increased by almost 6%, more than twice as much as for adults (2.5%). Only Germany managed to slightly reduce its already relatively low youth employment rate while the highest increase was recorded in Spain, followed by Ireland, the Slovak Republic, Greece and Iceland.
As a result, youth unemployment rates currently exceed 25% in seven countries (Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Slovak Republic, Spain and Sweden). The highest rate is in Spain, where more than 40% of youth, active in the labour market, are unemployed. By contrast, the youth unemployment rate is still at 10% or less in eight countries (Austria, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland).
By mid-2010, youth unemployment rates had reached record-high levels for the 25 last years. The average for OECD countries stood at 19% and in the European Union at 22%, which was a record for seven countries (Japan, United States, Portugal, Iceland, Hungary, Ireland and Sweden). However, nine countries (Netherlands, Korea, Germany, Australia, Turkey, France, Poland, Italy and the Slovak Republic) had experienced a higher youth unemployment rate than the current one between 1985 and 2009.
...and the short-term outlook for many young people, including those with relatively high skills, is rather gloomy
Youth unemployment rates are forecast to remain high at around 18% in 2011 and 17% in 2012. This is more than double the total unemployment rate, which stood at 8.6% in October 2010 and reach 20% on average in the OECD area in 2011. The ongoing recovery is in fact too weak to provide sufficient job opportunities to the many youth jobseekers. A significant and growing proportion of youth is at risk of prolonged unemployment, causing potentially negative long-term consequences for their careers, or so-called “scarring effects”.