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9.0 Consequences of youth joblessness
A number of other important changes in society accompanying the high and rising levels of youth unemployment are correlated with a number of other social outcomes:
a. Unemployed youths are increasingly concentrated in workless households. Of considerable concern is the fact that the proportion of teenagers and young adults (20-24) living in households in which nobody else is employed has risen in the EU as a whole and especially in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the UK. The share of unemployed youth living in workless households is, at over 40 per cent, highest in Finland, Ireland, and the UK and lowest in the southern European countries, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
b. Increasing proportions of young people are living with their parents. In Canada, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain there has been a strong increase between 1985 and 1996 in the proportion of young people living with their parents. In Canada and the US, low youth wages increased the likelihood that young women would remain living with their parents and that they would attend school; while low employment rates raised the chances that women would remain in their parents' home with only a marginal impact on their rate of school attendance. The proportion of young people living with their parents are especially high in Spain. Interestingly enough, Spain has the highest rate of home ownership in the OECD.
c. The young are increasingly involved in crime. Large numbers of young American men committed sufficiently serious crimes in the 1980s and 1990s to make 'prisoner' just about the fastest growing occupation among the young. This incarceration rate is approximately ten times higher than other western countries. In the UK, which has the highest rate of incarceration in western Europe, just under 50,000 people were in prison in 1995 or 0.13 per cent of the population aged 15-64 (48,983 men and 1,979 women). Many young persons involved in crime are employed before their arrest, suggesting that they have reservation wages for both legal and illegal work. The reaction of youths to the deteriorated job market in terms of enrolments, residence in parental homes, and crime suggests substantial supply responsiveness to economic incentives, which may augur well for the future.
d. Increasing numbers of young people are committing suicide. The gender disaggregated death rates per 100,000 by suicide and self-inflicted injury for young and older persons for 22 countries for 1970, 1980 and 1992 show that the suicide rates are in all cases higher for men than for women. Across the countries, there is a wide variation in both the adult and youth rates and considerable variation in the pattern of change. In English-speaking countries - the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland - rates of suicide rose sharply, which could potentially reflect the rising problems for youths in the job market in those countries, in particular, the increase in inequality that marked the 1980s. However, the rates of suicide also rose among young men in Norway, where earnings inequality is small and the social safety net high. That youths in these countries report themselves as being happier or more satisfied with their lives further complicates any simple interpretation of these patterns and their link with the increasingly elongated transition from school to work.
e.Engagement of youth in immoral activities.Lack of employment amongst the youth has caused a lot of suffering amongst the youth to an extent that in most cases they end up involving themselves in social vices such as prostitution so as to get their daily bread this fact is possible because most of the African families are faced with poverty thus they use their children as a source of income thus leading to abuse of their bodies due to their engagement in prostitution.
10.0 Asia and Africa: Repercussions of Unemployment on Youth,
The lack of good data makes it difficult to evaluate the extent of the youth labour market problem in many Asian and African countries. Tables 1 and 2 suggest considerable variation in the levels of GDP per capita in both Asia and Africa (cf. Gabon and Eritrea; Singapore and Nepal) and similarly for other variables such as infant death rates and primary school attendance. There are no consistent patterns of youth unemployment - they are very high in some countries (e.g. Algeria, Egypt, Mauritius, Sri Lanka) and very low in others (e.g. Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Thailand). Female unemployment rates are generally higher than male rates. There has been considerable growth in Asia and Africa, but presumably from a very low base, in the proportion of young people in 'third-level' or higher education, more prominently in general in Africa than in Asia and also more notably so for females rather than males.
The size of the agricultural sector in these countries tends to be large and in Africa the majority of the young live in rural areas. In contrast, for some Asian countries,
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