Nearly 75 million youth to be unemployed in 2012: ILO Report

Geneva, MAY 22 (Xinhua-ANI): There will be nearly 75 million unemployed youth in 2012, which accounts for 12.7 percent of the global youth labor force aged 15 to 24, an increase of nearly 4 million since 2007, said a report released Tuesday by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The projected unemployment rate remains unchanged from the peak of the crisis in 2009, and is slightly up from last year's 12.6 percent, according to the Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012 report.

The crisis-linked withdrawal from the labor market is particularly strong in developed economies, with a 18-percent youth unemployment rate being projected for this year, according to the report.

It said the rate would even be higher if one takes into account the 6.4 million youth worldwide who have either given up searching for a job or have decided to prolong their studies due to the extremely adverse conditions in the labor market. Taking this number into account, the adjusted global youth unemployment rate would be 13.6 percent in 2011.

The rate is not expected to come down until at least 2016, the report said. Further pressure on unemployment rates is expected when those extending their stay in the education system because of limited job prospects eventually enter the labor market.

"The youth unemployment crisis can be beaten but only if job creation for young people becomes a key priority in policy-making and private sector investment picks up significantly," said Executive Director of the ILO Employment Sector, Jose Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.

"This includes measures such as offering tax and other incentives to enterprises who hire young people, efforts to reduce the skills mismatch among youth, entrepreneurship programs that integrate skills training, mentoring and access to capital, and the improvement of social protection for the young,"he added.

Of particular concern are young people who are neither in employment nor in education or training, known by the acronym NEET in many countries, "disconnected youth" in the United States and "ni-ni" (neither-nor) in Spanish-speaking countries.

This group has been growing since the onset of the crisis, the report said. In 2010, 15.6 percent of youths in the United States were neither employed nor in education or training. In the European Union, the rate increased 1.9 percentage points from its pre-crisis level of 10.9 percent, and exceeded 15 percent in Bulgaria, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Romania and Spain. Data for 24 developing economies show an average NEET rate of 12.4 percent for young men and 28.1 percent for young women.

The report also found that globally and in most regions, the crisis had a stronger impact on youth unemployment rates among women than men. The difference was particularly strong in North Africa, while in developed economies, the impact was stronger for young men.

Many young people are trapped in low-productivity, temporary or other types of work that don't pave the way for better jobs. In developed economies, youth are increasingly employed in temporary and part-time jobs while in the developing world many perform unpaid work supporting informal family businesses or farms.

According to the study, between 2008 and 2011, the share of temporary contracts among young employees rose by 0.9 percentage points a year, which makes the figure nearly doubled since the onset of the economic crisis. (Xinhua-ANI)