Originally written June 7th, 2022:
Youth unemployment is a global epidemic. According to World Bank data, the worldwide youth (ages 15-24) unemployment rate reached 17.2% in 2020, an remarkable 2.6x higher than the comparable rate for all workers regardless of age. This ratio has increased steadily from around 2.2x only thirty years ago, and spiked to 2.9x during the late 2010s.
As with most global demographic data, stepping down one level of analysis to country-level data adds more detail to the story. In the main graph of this post, we show the ratio of youth unemployment rate to total unemployment rate for every country where World Bank data exists for 2020.
Incredibly, in all countries but two (Kazakhstan and Liberia), young workers face a much more challenging labor market than their older colleagues. In the median country (The Bahamas), the youth-to-total unemployment ratio reaches nearly 2.3x.
Follow @initiatingcoverage for more labor market analysis and visualizations in the future. We’ve written about this topic before (see our posts on employment by college major, and on quitting/hiring activity during the pandemic).