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Global youth unemployment is on the rise

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5 September, 2012According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) global unemployment rates among young people will increase from 12.7 per cent in 2012 to 12.9 per cent by 2017.

In developed economies in 2007, before the financial crisis began in the United States and spread to the euro zone, the unemployment rate for young people was only 12.5 per cent as opposed to 17.5 per cent in 2012 and a projected 15.6 per cent in 2017.

“Ironically, only in developed economies are youth unemployment rates expected to fall in the coming years, but this follows the largest increase in youth unemployment among all regions since the start of the crisis,” said Ernst Ekkehard, lead author of the ILO paper on Global Employment.  “This decline is mainly related to the fact that increasingly, young people are dropping out of the labour market as they find it more difficult to find a job [and] they are not counted among the unemployed.”

An ILO paper on the “Global Employment Outlook: Bleak Labour Market Prospects for Youth” shows that the impact of the euro crisis is spreading as far as East Asia and Latin America, making the situation worse for young jobseekers.

At the International Labour Conference (ILC) in June 2012 the ILO adopted a resolution calling for immediate, targeted and renewed action to tackle the youth employment crisis.

Today the ILO is calling on governments and social partners to foster pro-employment growth and decent job creation, promote macroeconomic policies and adopt fiscally sustainable and targeted measures such as labour-intensive infrastructure programmes, wage and training subsidies. 

View an interview with Ernst Ekkehard, author of “Global employment Outlook: Bleak Labour market Prospects for youth”  here: http://youtu.be/_RL6XFUgFyI