Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024

Yes, at least at the global level and in terms of the youth unemployment rate and also in terms of the youth employment-to-population ratio. In 2023, 64.9 million young people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed worldwide. This is the lowest number to date in the twenty-first century and nearly 4 million fewer than the number of unemployed youth in 2019 (before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic). Standing at 13 per cent in 2023, the global youth unemployment rate does not just reflect a full recovery from the COVID-19 peak; it is also at its lowest level in the past 15 years.

The recovery period thus represents a shift in the gender dynamics of young people’s transition to employment, with a greater degree of disadvantage falling to young women. If the current pace of change was to continue, the gender gap in youth employment to population ratio would not reach zero until well into the twenty-second century.

But the recovery gains for youth and their labour market prospects are already ebbing and recovery has not been universal or even. While Central and Western Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Northern, Southern and Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa all experienced youth unemployment rates during the recovery period that were at a multi-decade low, there remains the long-standing challenges faced by young people in the Arab States and North Africa, where youth unemployment rates remain critically high. The search for work by young jobseekers is a challenge everywhere, but more so in middle-income countries. 

Sustainable Development Goal target 8.6 called on countries to: “By 2020, substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training” (NEET). With the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the unprecedented jump in youth NEET rates across the globe that resulted, few countries in the world could claim to have met that target.

33 per cent of the world’s youth live in a country that is “off track” in its progress to meet SDG target 8.6. What is most concerning is that the countries that are showing a regressive trend in reducing youth NEET rates are low-income countries and situated in subregions where rates were already among the world’s highest.

Only in East Asia, Eastern Europe, North America, and Northern, Southern and Western Europe – that is, in primarily high-income countries – were youth NEET rates below 15 per cent.

Although youth employment and unemployment – both in absolute numbers and shares – have signaled recovery, many young people today feel anxious about the economy and their job prospects. Some signs of an increased sense of anxiety or unease among youth include:

• Worries about job loss
• Worries about job stability
• Lack of social mobility across generations
• Insufficient economic opportunities
• Limited financial independence
• General happiness levels among youth declining in some regions

Both temporary paid work and self-employment are correlated with informal employment, which is itself known to put workers in disadvantaged circumstances (compared to formal workers) in terms of income, hours, safety and protection under the law. Globally, more than one in two workers (57.8 per cent) are still in informal employment in 2024

Temporary paid workers (with a contract duration less than 12 months) now make up about one fifth to one quarter of employment among young adult workers. There has been a shift away from self-employment and into temporary paid employment in nearly all regions and country income groups. Insecure forms of work are the only option for most youth in developing regions. 

Temporary employment have risen particularly in East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. And young women are more likely than men to work in insecure forms of work except in Eastern Europe where the overall share of young adult workers in temporary work declining. 

How the real wages of young adults move in comparison to the adult cohort aged 30 and over also varies across countries. In countries where there is strong demand for entry-level work and a limited supply of job applicants, real wages for the young adult cohort should rise faster than for adults aged 30 and over. This is what is seen in Indonesia, Pakistan, Poland, Türkiye, the United States and Viet Nam, and Mexico in the most recent year. However, in Australia, Brazil, Colombia and Spain, the wage premium lies with the older cohorts, despite the declining youth share of the population, falling youth employment rates and rising education levels. 

The persistence of this wage gap (also known as a wage discount) can relate to the over-representation of young workers in part-time and temporary work, in certain types of occupations and/or economic sectors, and in the informal economy. 

Over the past two decades, significant shifts have taken place in terms of the sectoral distribution of employment, including youth employment, highlighting the structural transformations that have taken place in the global economy. From 2008, services took over as the largest employer of young people worldwide. Within services, three aggregated subsectors have been responsible for two thirds of the increase in the sector’s share: wholesale and retail trade; accommodation and food services; and other business services.

The share of youth employment accounted for by agriculture declined to 30.5 per cent by 2021, while the share accounted for by services rose to 45.9 per cent. The share of global youth employment accounted for by industry hardly changed over the two decades, rising from 21.3 per cent in 2001 to 23.6 per cent in 2021. Within the industry sector, manufacturing accounted for a diminishing share of youth jobs between 2001 and 2021, while construction has come to play a more dominant role, for young men in particular.

Educational attainment among young people is on the rise, but this does not necessarily mean that the benefits of such educational improvements have remained constant. 

Educational attainment is growing, and young people stay in school longer now than in previous decades. In the year 2000, just 38 per cent of the global youth population was engaged in some form of schooling or training. By 2023, the share had increased to nearly one in two (48 per cent). 

Young people’s participation in school/training has increased since the start of the twenty-first century with the exception of those in low-income countries. Among young people aged 15 to 24, the average share of youth attending school/training (regardless of their economic activity status) within the high-income country group was 62.6 per cent in 2023, more than 20 percentage points higher than the share of youth in school/training in the low-income country group. The shares of youth attending school/training were 40.1 per cent in low-income countries in 2023; 49.4 per cent in lower-middle-income countries; and 50.7 per cent in upper-middle-income countries. 

More young adults aged 25 to 29 in high-income and middle-income countries are choosing to stay in (or return to) school at the post-secondary levels. By contrast, the share has declined slightly in low-income countries. For those who can afford it, prolonged schooling can serve as a cushion against labour market entry during turbulent times. Conversely, in lower-income countries, economic crises tend to pull young people out of school/training instead. 

The returns from higher education depends on a variety of interacting factors. In order for educational premiums to be realized, there must be sufficient availability of appropriate jobs for those with higher levels of qualifications. Moreover, higher returns for tertiary education can be something of a double-edged sword, potentially also leading to increasing inequalities in labour market outcomes.

For all but young men in lower-middle- and low-income countries, the youth NEET rate of those with less than a tertiary-level education is higher than that of the tertiary educated. The results are especially striking for young adult women, confirming that young women gain more from tertiary education – in terms of reduced NEET rates – than young men do. It is also evident that benefits associated with higher levels of education – in terms of the reduced likelihood of being NEET – are greater in high-income countries than in developing parts of the world. 

While the gender-based differences in the youth NEET rate benefits accruing to more educated young women and men, respectively, remain substantial, they have actually fallen during the new millennium. In low- and lower-middle-income countries, young people (ages 15 to 29) with an advanced education are much more likely to be unemployed compared to young people with only a basic education. The difference was nearly fourfold in low-income countries in 2023 (with the unemployment rate of youth with advanced degrees at 21.0 per cent compared to 5.8 per cent for those with basic education) and nearly double in lower-middle-income countries. 

For young adults in low- and middle-income countries, the benefits of attaining a tertiary education emerge in the resulting quality of employment (lower incidences of both informal work and low-paid work), rather than in the quantity of employment. Such results hint at a continuing failure in these economies to create high-skilled jobs at a pace that is sufficient to meet the growing supply of tertiary graduates.

Tertiary-educated young adults continue to have firm advantages over lesser educated young adults in the realm of job quantity, but there has been an erosion in returns related to job quality, most notably in high-income countries. Given the costs of higher education in some countries (with associated debt), young people may be logical in questioning whether such costs are worth the price. At the same time, employers facing labour shortages are also found to be increasingly open to the idea of recruiting directly from secondary schools.

On the whole, youth-targeted active labour market programmes (ALMPs) are shown to be effective in improving labour market outcomes. Their impacts are larger in low- and middle-income countries and for young people who are at the greatest risk of labour market exclusion, including young women and youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Overall, interventions linked to skills training and entrepreneurship were found to have larger impacts on labour market outcomes for youth than investments put towards employment services and subsidized employment. In low- and middle-income countries, entrepreneurship support and employment services report larger impacts, while in high-income countries, skills training and wage subsidies lead to larger impacts, on average.

ALMPs that combine various components and intervention types, include soft skills and provide a certificate upon completion of the programme lead to better labour market outcomes of youth, especially in low- and middle-income countries.