Global Employment Trends for Youth: Youth employment deteriorated in India: ILO report

Source: The post is based on the article “Youth employment deteriorated in India: ILO report” published in The Hindu on 11th August 2022.

What is the News?

The International Labour Organisation(ILO) has released the Global Employment Trends for Youth 2022 report. The report provides an update on key youth labour market indicators and trends.

What are the key findings of the report?

Global findings

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on employment: The total global number of unemployed youths is estimated to reach 73 million in 2022, a slight improvement from 2021 (75 million) but still six million above the pre-pandemic level of 2019.

Gender Gap: Young women are worse off than young men exhibiting a much lower employment-to-population ratio(EPR). In 2022, 27.4% of young women globally are projected to be in employment, compared to 40.3 per cent of young men. This means that young men are almost 1.5 times more likely than young women to be employed.

Regional Differences: The recovery in youth unemployment is projected to diverge. For instance, high-income countries are the only ones expected to achieve youth unemployment rates close to those of 2019 by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, in the other country income groups, the rates are projected to remain more than 1% point above their pre-crisis values.

Green and Blue Future: The report said young people were well-placed to benefit from the expansion of the so-called green and blue economies centred around the environment and sustainable ocean resources respectively.

Findings related to India

The youth employment participation rate declined by 0.9% points over the first nine months of 2021 relative to its value in 2020. The situation is particularly severe for very young people aged 15-20 years

Online Education: The school closures in India lasted 18 months and among the 24 crore school-going children, only 8% of such children in rural areas and 23% in urban areas had adequate access to online education.

Female Labour Market: India has a very low youth female labour market participation and Indian young women experienced larger relative employment losses than young men in 2021 and 2022.

High Informal Sector: Domestic work is a highly informal sector in India and wages are extremely low and young women and girls are vulnerable to abuse.