UE / Youth unemployment has been around long before the crisis

One of the more tragic outcomes of the euro crisis has been the gut-wrenchingly high youth unemployment rates.  More than half of the young people in Greece and Spain are looking for work.

“Europe is facing an often-cited “lost generation” which experiences long periods of unemployment or unstable jobs during their first working years, with serious long-term consequences,” says Deutsche Bank’s Stefan Vetter.

Indeed, Europe’s more recent economic problems have caused these unemployment rates to surge.

But Vetter notes that to youth unemployment has been a long-term, structural problem that has been around even during the good times long before the crisis.

Youth unemployment is currently especially pressing, but it is not a new phenomenon specific to this crisis. The relative youth unemployment rate, i.e. the unemployment rate of those aged 16-24 divided by the total unemployment rate, illustrates that it is a structural problem. For many years the unemployment rate of young adults between 16 and 24 has been roughly twice as high as for the general population. The relative rate is remarkably stable for most countries and does not change significantly even in booms and recessions…

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Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor

via Europe’s Structural Youth Unemployment – Business Insider.