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U.N.: Youth Unemployment Rises in Asia Unemployment among young people in Asia has risen dramatically over the past decade, with 10 million more youths out of work in 2003 than 10 years earlier, the United Nations labor agency said Wednesday. The numbers represent a 37 percent jump in the unemployment rate of Asians aged 15 to 24, from 8 percent of the age group to almost 11 percent, according to the 2004 International Labor Organization report on youth unemployment. Despite the increase, Asia still fares better than other developing regions, where between 16 percent and 25 percent of young people are unemployed, the report said. The report said nations should pay more attention to youth unemployment, in part because people who get a good start to their working life are less likely to be chronically unemployed later. "Enlarging the chances of young people to find and keep decent work is absolutely critical" to reducing poverty, said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia in a press release. The report also said young people tend to have more trouble than adults when trying to find jobs in economic downturns. "What you always see in crises is that young people are the first to lose their jobs, and they are the last to get jobs again," said Dorothea Schmidt, an ILO expert based at the organization's headquarters in Geneva and one of the report's co-authors. Southeast Asia - which suffered a sharp economic downturn in 1997 - has been hit particularly hard, with youth unemployment rates rising by 86 percent in the past 10 years, from 8.8 percent to 16.4 percent. The youth unemployment rate increased by about 46 percent in East Asia, including China, from 4.8 percent to 7 percent, and by about 9 percent in South Asia, from 12.8 percent to 13.9 percent. The regional figures did not include Japan, which the report analyzed in a separate section on industrialized economies. The unemployment figures do not include youth who are not counted in the labor market because they are in school or not looking for work.
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