Youth unemployment is the situation of young people who are looking for a job but cannot find a job, with the age range being defined by the United Nations as 15–24 years old. An unemployed person is defined as someone who does not have a job but is actively seeking one. To be qualified as unemployed for official and statistical measurement, the individual must be without employment, willing and able to work, of the officially designated "working age" (often from the teens to the mid-60s) and actively searching for a position. Youth unemployment rates tend to be higher than adult rates in every country in the world.
Youth unemployment has largely been described as a major, if not the primary catalyst for revolution, political and, societal upheaval, and, conflict towards the system and, state. It has historically been associated with upheaval and change or overthrow of the political establishment and mass societal change, with conflicts such as the Arab Spring, Russian civil war and the French revolution all largely being caused by large scale youth unemployment.
There are 1.2 billion youth in the world aged between 15 and 24, accounting for 17% of the world's population. 87% of them live in developing countries. The age range defined by the United Nations addresses the period when mandatory schooling ends until the age of 24. This definition remains controversial as it not only impacts unemployment statistics but also plays an important role in the targeted solutions designed by policy makers in the world.
Two main debates are ongoing today. First, defining the age range of youth is not as obvious as it seems. Two theoretical perspectives have dominated this debate. Youth can be seen as a stage in life between adolescence and adulthood or as a socially constructed group with its own sub-culture, making it difficult to establish a comparable age range between countries. Second, the definition of unemployment itself leads to the possibility of not accounting for a number of young people left out of work.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period. Unemployment is measured by the unemployment rate, which is the number of people who are unemployed as a percentage of the labour force (the total number of people employed added to those unemployed).
The Arab Spring (ar-rabīʻ al-ʻarabī) was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began in Tunisia in response to corruption and economic stagnation. From Tunisia, the protests then spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. Rulers were deposed (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia in 2011, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya in 2011, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in 2011, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen in 2012) or major uprisings and social violence occurred including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies.
This course examines growth from various angles: economic growth, growth in the use of resources, need for growth, limits to growth, sustainable growth, and, if time permits, population growth and gro
This course aims to introduce the basic principles of machine learning in the context of the digital humanities. We will cover both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, and study and imple
In many countries, payment of unemployment benefit is conditional on active job-seeking on the part of recipients, who are required to accept any "reasonable" job offers made to them (Dalloz 2008). In France, this notion of "Reasonable Job Offer" (ORE) has ...
EPFL2024
, , , , , ,
The effects of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market are matters of great social concern. Economists and technology experts are debating at what rate, and to what extent, technology could be used to replace humans in occupations, and ...
2022
We exploit differences across U.S. states' exposure to trade to study the effects of changes in the exchange rate on economic activity. Across states, trade-weighted exchange rate depreciations are associated with increased state exports, reduced state une ...