Youth employment Policy in Developing and Transition Countries – Prevention as well as Cure

The paper focuses on two kinds of policy intervention – preventative and curative. A preventative intervention tries to counteract the processes that generate a problem; a curative intervention tries to deal with their consequences. In the case of poverty, for instance, a curative intervention will find out where the poor are and try to alleviate their situation; a preventative intervention will analyze the causes of poverty and devise strategies to prevent it. In the case of youth employment policy, there is a similar distinction: this paper aims to shift the emphasis from curative towards preventative interventions – from treating the symptoms to dealing with the underlying causes.
The structure of the paper is as follows. Section A proposes that the starting point for policy discussion should be the employment problems of those young people in developing and transition countries who are at the greatest disadvantage, rather than merely those who are unemployed. In section B, as a framework for policy formulation, it is suggested that the position and potential in the labor market of the disadvantaged young depends partly on the strength and dynamism of the demand for labor in general and partly on the extent to which they are able to integrate into economic processes so that, when the demand for labor increases, they can take advantage of the greater scope for improving the quality and quantity of their employment.
Section C reviews the youth employment policies and programs that have been implemented in developing and transition countries. Section D briefly outlines the policy measures needed to deal with the problem of educated unemployment – not the fundamental youth employment problem but one which is of understandable concern to governments. Section E sets out the key data needs for diagnosis and monitoring of the employment problems of disadvantaged youth, including a minimum format of data that should be routinely available. Finally, in Section F, the threads of the policy discussion are pulled together into a set of policies that can help to prevent the emergence of employment problems among the disadvantaged young in developing and transition countries. (Authors own Summary)