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Other Australia 17.4 13 29.9 5 19.2 8
OECD Canada 10.2 5 42.5 10 20.9 9
United States3 12.0 8 33.4 6 18.4 7
Notes: 1) This is defined as: (unemployed not in school+inactive not in school)/total population of the age group. 2) This is defined as: (unemployed not in school+inactive not in school)/total population of the age group not in school. 3) Refer to 1993. Source: OECD Economic Outlook 1996, Table 4.8 and 4.9 and OECD Database.
Non-employment rate respectively are .61 and .54. Hardly a very close relationship between series which are supposedly representing the same phenomenon. Others argue for the use of the unemployment/population ratio (e.g. Gaude, 1997). Using this type of definition often radically changes the impression of the magnitude of the problem particularly when one looks at cross-country definitions. This is particularly true when one looks at teenage unemployment.
Table 2 presents a similar comparison to table 1. However, this time the two reported statistics are the unemployment/population ratio and the unemployment rate (1995) of 15-19 year old males. Once again there are striking differences between the two indices, even more so than in the previous table. The difference between the two indices depends on the labour force participation rate. Countries with relatively low labour force participation rates of teenagers will tend to score better according to the first index vis-a-vis the second. The rank correlation coefficient in this case is .16. Although unemployment/population ratios are more readily available, the statistic is perhaps less meaningful than the non-employment ratio or rate since, other things being equal, the more discouraged workers there are the lower will be this ratio.
Table 2
Unemployment population ratio, unemployment rates with rankings
Country Unemployment/ Population Ranking Unemployment rates Ranking
Europe Belgium 2.7 1 30.6 12
Denmark 5.1 6 7.3 1
France 3.0 3 24.1 10
Germany 2.7 2 7.9 2
Greece 3.7 4 21.8 9
Ireland 7.0 8 28.0 11
Italy 7.4 9 31.5 13
Netherland 6.3 7 14.1 4
Portugal 3.9 5 14.0 3
Spain 10.4 13 46.0 14
United Kingdom 9.5 10 19.5 6
Other OECD Australia 10.9 14 19.7 7
Canada 9.8 11 19.8 8
United States 10.1 12 18.4 5
Source: OECD Database.
Whatever the merits of the foregoing arguments, this paper continues to employ the conventional unemployment definition, since it is the only statistic which is widely available across a range of countries, and over an extended time period. Some comfort may be drawn from the fact that, at least within countries, movements in the series are likely to be highly correlated over time. It should , however, be born in mind that veryoften, when talking about, in particular teenage unemployment rates, we are in fact referring to a rather small group of people due to the low labour force participation of this group.
4.0 Who are the young unemployed?
Youth unemployment is by no means spread evenly amongst young people. A number of individual characteristics tend to increase or reduce the likelihood that a young person becomes unemployed. Let us look at a few of these in turn.
Women vs. men
There does not appear to be any strict pattern in the relationship between male and female unemployment rates. In the countries for which ILO-comparable data is available, women face higher youth (as well as adult) unemployment rates than men more often than not, although this varies much from one country to another. Figure 6 shows the ratio of female to male unemployment rates for different age-groups over time for a number of European countries. It can be seen from the figure that in several European countries (Finland, France, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain) female youth unemployment rates are significantly higher than male youth unemployment rates. Thus, in a number of countries, the situation facing young women is particularly serious. If one looks at developments over time, one notes that, particularly in Southern European countries, this pattern has remained fairly constant or tended to slightly increase over time. This might be attributed to the exogenous tendency for the labour force participation rates of adult women to rise. In as much as adult women tend to be employed in less skilled work than men, there may be greater substitutability between young and adult women than there is for younger and older males
5.0 Characteristics of youth unemployment
Youth unemployment rates are higher than adult unemployment rates
The most obvious general labour market characteristic of youth unemployment is that its rate is higher than that of adults. Figures 1a and 1b illustrate this separately for males and females. The observation is true across a wide range of countries (not just in Europe or indeed in industrialised countries) and across gender. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule. In Germany female unemployment rates appear to increase with age whilst young male adults (20-24) have unemployment rates which are higher than both prime-age adults and teenagers. This "inverted-U" shape profile of unemployment is found in a number of other countries. One observes this pattern in Indonesia and the Philippines and for males in Finland, Portugal and Sweden.
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