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The youth unemployment rate is increasing in many countries and unemployment affects future work participation. This study examined the long-term effect of unemployment on future unemployment in Sweden. Unemployed individuals had an elevated risk of unemployment during follow-up. In addition to the human suffering caused, this can result in increased welfare payments and loss of productivity and tax income to a society. For some individuals participation in an [ALMP] Active Labour Market Program increased the risk of future unemployment, whereas attainment of a higher educational level decreased the risk. Immigrants seem not to be more vulnerable to unemployment than native Swedes.

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This report examines the real and hidden costs of young adult unemployment to America's taxpayers and its devastating impact on the economy. According to the report, crisis-level young adult unemployment not only reduces the economic security of a generation, but also drains desperately needed resources from state and federal governments. The report's authors found that high youth unemployment effectively adds an additional 53 dollars to each taxpayer's federal tax bill. The costs are even higher when including lost state income tax revenue. These costs result primarily from lost tax revenue.

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Despite the recent economic recovery, youth unemployment in the UK is still almost three times higher than the rest of the population. Getting into work is especially tough for disadvantaged young people facing extra challenges in their lives. In 2015, the Government announced an additional three million apprenticeships by 2020 and that the Youth Obligation will provide jobseekers aged 18-21 with intensive employability support to get them work-ready. These steps provide an opportunity to ensure that the most disadvantaged young people receive the support they need to enter work. This report examines the barriers faced by disadvantaged young people seeking to enter employment and what can be done to help.

Key findings include: (1) young people have ambitious personal goals and aspirations. However, homelessness forces them to focus on getting straight into paid, full-time work rather than gaining further qualifications which might advance their career in the long term; (2) many employers want to offer opportunities to disadvantaged young people, but the majority (76 per cent) do not currently target any of their opportunities at this group; (3) traineeships are an essential first step into employment for many of the most disadvantaged young people, but only four per cent of employers provide traineeships to disadvantaged young people; (4) a lack of funding was the most common barrier preventing employers from offering opportunities to disadvantaged young people; (5) disadvantaged young people need additional support to thrive in employment or apprenticeships, often provided by specialist organisations, which needs additional funding; and (6) disadvantaged young people cannot afford to take up an apprenticeship due to the low wage (£3.30 per hour). Parents whose child becomes an apprentice will also no longer be able to claim child benefit.

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Young people with low or no qualifications make up 39 per cent of all young people unemployed and not in education, and 47 per cent of those inactive and outside learning, despite only accounting for a quarter of the youth population. People with higher qualifications are more likely to be employed, and earn more, than those with lower qualifications. For these reasons, active labour market policies for young people have tended to focus on training (often alongside employment subsidies, work experience and support with looking for work). However successive evaluations found mixed results for training programs. This paper reviews research on how effective training programs are in raising qualifications and skills of people who are out work. It specifically looks at the effectiveness of training programs targeted at increasing the employment and skills of young people who are not in learning or work and who have low or no skills. It explains what lessons can be learnt from previous programs. It makes recommendations on designing future training programs for low-skilled and out-of-work young people aged 19-24.

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Young people have been hit hard by unemployment during the Irish recession. While much research has been undertaken to study the effects of the recession on overall labour market dynamics, little is known about the specific effects on youth unemployment and the associated challenges. This paper attempts to fill this gap by comparing the profile of transitions to work before the recession (2006) and as the economy emerged from the recession (2011). The results indicate that the rate of transition of the youth from unemployment to employment fell dramatically. The fall is not due to changes in the composition or the characteristics of the unemployed group but to changes in the external environment, which implied that the impact of certain individual characteristics changed over the course of the recession. In particular, for youth, education and nationality have become more important for finding a job in Ireland.

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Younger workers consistently experience higher unemployment and less job stability than older workers. Yet the dramatic deterioration in employment outcomes among younger workers during and since the Great Recession creates new urgency about developing more effective bridges into full-time employment for young people, especially those with less than a bachelor's degree. Improving the employment status of young adults and helping employers meet workforce needs are complementary goals. Designing strategies to achieve them requires insight into the supply and demand sides of the labor market: both the characteristics of young people and their typical routes into employment as well as the demand for entry-level workers and the market forces that shape employer decisions about hiring and investing in skill development.

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This book gives insights into the views and experiences of young people as they face work - or unemployment. The author sees industrial and technological change as likely to lead either to a more centralised and controlled society, or to one in which the capacities of individuals are valued and used. Show less

The recent increase in youth unemployment has major implications for the current and future development of European labour markets. Previous studies reveal the long lasting 'scarring effects' of early unemployment experience on later career prospects, including a higher probability of future unemployment or social exclusion. Self-employment is often advocated as a potential remedy for unemployment in general and youth unemployment in particular. In this study, we investigate the individual-level factors that lead young people with the 'scar' of previous unemployment to engage in self-employment. Based on a recent survey among young adults in eleven European countries, we show that previous unemployment has a significant moderating effect on other individual-level characteristics usually associated with a higher likelihood of being self-employed. While the overall propensity of self-employment is not affected by unemployment experience, the reasons for becoming one's own boss differ considerably between those young adults who have and those who have not experienced unemployment in the past.

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Gaining employment in society is a critical stage in the lives of most young people, but statistics show that young migrants face greater barriers than do young people from the majority population. In this article, [the author] highlights how young adults of migrant background who live in Sweden handle and resist labour exclusion by focusing on how they try to improve their chances of getting a future occupation. The results show that the informants use various strategies to try to prevent future labour exclusion. Some of them are related to the construction of a 'Swedish' identity and dissociation from a migrant position, others to the importance of choosing the right education, struggling to find a job or adapting in different ways to societal and racialized discourses.

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At the end of 2016, there were just over 20 million young people in South Africa and for 7.5 million of them not to be in school, training or employment poses an enormous challenge. This report seeks to do three things. In the first section, the authors try to provide a clear account of the scale of the crisis of youth unemployment, making the point that the sheer number of unemployed young people means that South Africa needs to think hard about the extent to which the approach to addressing this issue has any chance of success. The second section reviews the principal approaches that are commonly discussed for resolving youth unemployment and seeks to show that there is little likelihood that these approaches will have much more than a marginal impact on the numbers of young unemployed. The final section makes the case that only systemic reforms that increase the rate of job creation and reduce the rate of job destruction significantly will lead to rapid reductions in youth unemployment. This will generate faster growth and push South Africa onto a more labour intensive development trajectory.

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