Why should officials spend limited time, energy, and public funding specifically on unemployed young people, rather than on all of the unemployed? asks Daniel Gros.
Does a teenager’s unemployment represent a greater loss to society than that of a single mother or an older worker, who might have been providing an entire family’s only income? The loss of the value added produced by a teenager is probably much lower.
In purely economic terms, one could thus argue that youth unemployment (especially teenage part-time unemployment) is much less important than unemployment among those who are in their prime earning years. Moreover, young people have the option of continuing their education, thus adding to future earnings power, whereas continuing education is a much less viable alternative for their elders.
Europe has a general macroeconomic problem, owing to demand factors that interact with a rigid labor market, rather than a specific youth-unemployment problem. This implies that there is no need for ad hoc measures for young people, which merely risk overloading welfare systems with even more exemptions and special rules.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor
via Europe’s Youth Unemployment Non-Problem by Daniel Gros – Project Syndicate.
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