Designing Active Labor Market Policies to Tackle Youth Unemployment

Abstract

What if one percent of the bailout money that policymakers paid to bail out those who caused the recent financial crisis had been invested in youth employment initiatives? Would we still be seeing these exorbitant youth unemployment rates around the world? That is a question I had asked myself a few years back while writing an essay for the St. Gallen Symposium (Vogel, 2010). In 2013, at the verge of a generational meltdown, European policymakers finally started to make a move in this direction with large-scale programs such as the Youth Guarantee. But the question is whether such a reactive move could have been anticipated in order to avoid the situation we are in right now if policymakers had given youth a greater priority and not just those who have the biggest lobbying power? I guess that the question “could we have avoided it?” is asked after all major catastrophes.

Improving youth labor market outcomes requires an in-depth understanding of employment and labor market issues that are country specific. Analysis of youth labor markets, with particular emphasis on the issues that characterize youth transitions to decent work, is crucial for determining countryspecific needs and for shaping policies and programmatic interventions. A global movement framed by the ILO’s Call for Action is required to break the vicious circle that keeps so many millions of youth out of education and stuck in nonproductive employment and poverty.

ILO, 2013