In a previous column (“The global and Turkish jobs crises,” Dec. 28, 2009), I discussed how, despite the easing of the great recession, the global job crisis had persisted and why it was worse than what the still exceptionally high official rates of unemployment had indicated, according to “The World of Work Report 2009: The Global Jobs Crisis and Beyond,” published by the Geneva-based International Labor Organization (ILO). In this column, I will focus on what is perhaps socially and politically the most dangerous dimension of that crisis, global youth unemployment, based on the ILO report titled “Global Employment Trends for Youth - Special Issue on the Impact of the Global Economic Crisis on Youth” and the most recent Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) data, both published about two weeks ago.
The ILO report, whose previous editions were published in 2004, 2006 and 2008, differs from the earlier editions because it is the first one to come out in the midst of a global crisis. It analyzes the worsening vulnerabilities of youth, defined as men and women between the ages of 15 and 24, to economic and other ravages of unemployment as a ticking time bomb.
Although the share of youth in the global population has been decreasing during the last two decades, it is still high, around 20 percent, in many developing regions, which account for 90 percent of the world’s youth. Noting that youth unemployment is linked with social exclusion, the report raises the fear of “a possible crisis legacy of a ‘lost generation’ made up of young people who detach themselves from the labor market altogether,” subject to the “social hazards associated with joblessness and prolonged inactivity,” especially in developing countries. It emphasizes that unemployment suffered when young often severely damages prospects of long-term steady and gainful employment, partly due to chronic harmful work behavior patterns that emerge from feelings of uselessness and the boredom of idleness.
The ILO report’s major findings about global trends can be summarized as follows: (1) At the end of 2009, estimated youth unemployment in the world reached 80.7 million persons, 7.8 million higher than in 2007 when the global crisis began. During the crisis, the youth unemployment rate jumped more rapidly than ever before from 11.9 percent to 13 percent, a growing social and political danger as well as “a vast waste of economic potential” all over the world. The ILO report predicts that before declining to 12.7 percent in 2011, the rate will rise further to 13.1 percent this year. (2) We have to view this short-term trend in the youth unemployment rate in the context of long-term trends in the youth labor participation rate (employment-to-labor force ratio), the share of youth who are employed in the youth population (employment-to-population ratio) and the youth unemployment rate. Globally, the youth labor force participation rate decreased from 54.7 percent to 50.8 percent and the youth employment-to-population-ratio dropped from 47.9 percent to 44.7 percent between 1998 and 2008. Both of these trends are largely due to a higher proportion of youth engaged in education, but the discouragement of youth from work is another reason. The global youth unemployment rate had been trending downward before the crisis but was still much higher than the adult unemployment rate: The youth unemployment rate was 12.1 percent and the adult unemployment rate was 4.8 percent in 2008. The youth-to-adult unemployment ratio rose from 2.6 in 1998 to 2.8 in 2008. Youth are often disadvantaged by lack of skills and work experience in finding and keeping jobs. (3) The youth unemployment rate, bad as it is, does not reflect the dire predicament of young workers who toil predominantly under informal, intermittent and insecure work conditions, with meager social protection, that result in poor productivity and low wages. Suffering from excessive decent work deficits, they are more susceptible to poverty than older workers. In 2008, an estimated 152 million young workers, comprising more than 28 percent of all young workers in the world, engaged mostly in agriculture and many lacking even primary education, lived with their families on less than $1.25 a day. Their share of the world’s total working poor exceeded their share of total global employment. The rest of the ILO report, which contains findings by region and by sex in addition to the global ones I summarized, deals with various policy recommendations to decrease youth unemployment.
We see that on average Turkey’s youth employed-to-youth population ratio, around 30 percent, is lower than the global ratio, around 45 percent. Likewise, Turkey’s youth labor force participation rate, around 38 percent, is much lower than the global rate, around 51 percent. In addition, Turkey’s youth unemployment rate, around 21 percent, is much higher than the global rate, around 13 percent. Turkey’s youth non-agricultural unemployment rate, around 25 percent, is even higher. The good news is that, reflecting Turkey’s recent impressive economic recovery, the youth labor market conditions have begun to improve significantly -- along with the overall higher employment and lower unemployment improvements.
