Introduction
This information is designed to assist YEN Lead Countries to measure and analyse key national labour market indicators on youth employment. It informs on the definitions, concepts, calculations and data sources for each indicator so countries can monitor their youth employment situation.
Background
In the past three years the YEN has focused on supporting Lead Countries in developing National Action Plans on Youth Employment (NAPs) - a vehicle to prioritize and operationalize youth employment. As countries embark on the implementation of their NAPs, policies and programmes, there have been a number of requests for guidance on establishing targets and means of measuring progress toward reaching these. The third meeting of Lead Countries was designed to initiate a discussion on benchmarking youth employment policies and programs in order to identify standard indicators, monitor performance, and provide countries with targets to aim for.
The key challenge in identifying meaningful indicators on youth employment is to avoid imposing costly collection of new data and to use existing data wherever possible. Therefore, it is proposed to use the revised employment indicators recommended and elaborated by the ILO and the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Technical Working Group on Employment. These revised indicators came out in early 2008. As Lead Countries have agreed to report on the progress made towards reaching the MDGs, the disaggregation of this data by age will allow Lead Countries to assess and compare their progress in tackling youth employment challenges and readily report on it. Additional youth labour market indicators have been selected to complement the information offered by the MDGs employment indicators, aiming to have a comprehensive picture of the employment conditions for young people.
Youth Employment Indicators
Recognizing that decent and productive work for all is key to addressing poverty and hunger, MDG 1 includes a new target and new indicators. This new Target (MDG 1.B) - Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people - contains some indicators specifically and directly relating to employment issues, including youth employment.
The indicators below, organized by key areas of labour market performance/outcomes, are proposed for tracking progress on youth employment at the country level. It is recommended that all indicators be presented disaggregated by sex, youth age cohorts (15-19 and 20-24 year old), educational level, and rural/urban location whenever possible. Progress can be measured by undertaking trends analysis of these indicators, comparing indicators on an annual basis against those at the baseline year (i.e. starting year of reporting which will be 2009).
The Youth Labour Market Indicators Lead Countries should report on include:
1. Youth unemployment rate
2. Relaxed youth unemployment rate
3. Status of young workers in employment
4. Distribution of youth population by primary activity
5. Youth employment by sector
6. Median earnings for wage and salaried young workers
7. Educational attainment of the youth labour force
|
