Joblessness wreaking global havoc

Warning that youth unemployment, which has skyrocketed to a record level, is dragging down the world economy, the United Nations has called for concerted and targeted measures to the tackle the problem.

"We are wasting an important part of the energy and talent of the most educated youth generation the world has ever had," International Labour Organization director-general Juan Somavia said. "Enlarging the chances of young people to find and keep decent work is absolutely critical to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals."

These goals, set by the UN Millennium summit of 2000, call for achieving a set of specific targets by 2015, including halving extreme poverty and hunger and slashing child and maternal mortality rates.

Giving the grim statistics in a new report, ILO says young people aged 15 to 24 represent nearly half the world's jobless although they are only 25 per cent of the working age population.

Halving world youth unemployment rate would add at least $2.2 trillion to global gross domestic product equal to around 4 per cent of the 2003 value, says the report -- "Global Employment Trends for Youth 2004".

The relative disadvantage of youth, it stresses, is more pronounced in developing countries, where they make up a strikingly higher proportion of the labour force than in industrialised economies.

Eighty-five per cent of the world's youth live in developing countries where they are 3.8 times more likely to be unemployed than adults, as compared with 2.3 times in industrialised economies.

But the problem, the ILO says, goes far beyond the large number of young unemployed people - 47 per cent of the total 186 million people out of work worldwide in 2003.

Young people also represent 130 million of the world's 550 million working poor who are unable to lift themselves and their families above the equivalent of the one dollar per day poverty line. These young people struggle to survive, often performing work under unsatisfactory conditions in the informal economy, it adds.

The report puts global youth unemployment at 14.4 per cent in 2003, a 26.8 per cent increase over the past decade, with rates highest in the Middle East and North Africa (25.6 per cent), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (21 per cent), transition economies (18.6 per cent), Latin America and the Caribbean (16.6 per cent), Southeast Asia (16.4 per cent), and South Asia (13.9 per cent).

Unemployment among youth in industrialised economies was (13.4 per cent), and East Asia (7 per cent). The industrialised economic region was the only region where youth unemployment saw a distinct decrease from 15.4 per cent in 1993.

The report shows that the growth in the number of young people is rapidly outstripping the ability of economies to provide them with jobs. While the overall youth population grew by 10.5 per cent over the last 10 years to more than 1.1 billion in 2003, youth employment grew by only 0.2 per cent to around 526 million, the statistics show.

Rising worldwide employment has hit young people hard, especially young women. Those who can find work often face long working hours, short-term or informal contracts, low pay and little or no social protection such as social security or other social benefits, the report added.