Early work experience and the future of youth in developing countries

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about whether the number of Mexican young adults not in education, employment or training (NEETS) has increased (Székely, 2011). To understand the estimates of NEETS it is important to know what they do with their time. In this article, using the 2010 Mexican Census we measure the number of Mexican NEETS by sex and place of residence (rural or urban). In order to understand how they spend their time, we use the National Survey of Time Use (ENUT, 2009) to estimate the number of hours they spend doing housework, taking care of other people and in recreational activities. We pay special attention to gender and age differences in time use. We expect young females to spend more time than their male counterparts in domestic chores and caregiving. We compare the amount of time NEETS spend in these type of chores with the time other youngsters dedicate to the same chores. We expect NEETS to spend more time in housework and care activities. Our results have implications in two directions: First, they suggest that the definition of NEETS needs to be revised, as it includes many women who are dedicated to housework. Secondly, it shows that even when many young men are not working nor in education, current data sources do not serve to completely understand what they do with their time.

This paper provides insight into the costs of coping with employment shocks through informal sector employment by examining the long-term impact of completing high school during a recession on both earnings and the ability to find formal sector work. The context is Indonesia, which in 1998 suffered one of the world’s most severe downturns in the last thirty years. We ask: what are the long-term consequences for life outcomes (employment, earnings, consumption) of early work experience in the informal and self-employed sectors? Were crisis-affected youth more or less likely to suffer adverse consequences from beginning their careers in the informal sector than youth taking a first job in the informal sector during other periods? We use individual, family, and community data from all rounds of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), take advantage of the education, employment, and migration histories available in the data, and combine them with characteristics of local labor markets and the macro economy, constructed from the annual national labor force survey (the SAKERNAS), to answer these questions. We use local labor market and macroeconomic shocks at the district at the time important schooling and initial employment decisions were being made to identify the effects of these decisions on long-term individual outcomes.

Georgia belongs to the countries of the Post-Soviet area, which has been the first country to conduct the reforms in the educational field and acquire the European educational system. On the basis of the reforms the main directions of both school and higher education have greatly changed. Georgian educational space has significantly approached the European one, though different problems still exist and their study will help us in finding the ways to solve them. Among such problems one of the most important problems is the education and employment issue, that was common for Soviet Georgia. In the Post-Soviet period, political and economic crises existing in Georgia caused the devaluation of the labour market.
In the paper there will be discussed the issues of education and employment in contemporary Georgia. The paper will be based on researches conducted in education and employment field, on statistical data, on the reports and researches of foreign and Georgian experts.

Education is a main part of human capital investment so as to boost economic growth, which was proved by many empirical studies in East Asia. In 1998, China was going to follow this path and its college intake increased rapidly. But more and more youth college graduates faced unemployment or had to work in informal sectors. Does college expansion lead more youth unemployment? The author uses a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model to study this issue. In the model, labor is classified into three education levels and six occupation types; and different type of person has different sack rate, job entry limitation and willingness to change his occupation. The simulation is designed as, assumed college expansion had not happened, to see what the difference were. It is certain that China would go into another growth path with a different college composition of labor force and a different youth unemployment rate. The result may shed light on the relation between college expansion and youth unemployment.

Many youth in Latin America lack clear occupational opportunities. This uncertainty in achievement a regular job may affect transitions to adulthood in terms of social roles related with age and stage of life course (involving prolonged education, frequent job changes, postponement of events, family dependence, etc.). The purpose of this paper is to ask weather increasing labor insecurity in local labor markets of Latin America have produced a fundamental shift in transitions to adulthood. The aim is to examine the relationship between job insecurity and transition to adulthood in Mexican women. We use data from a longitudinal study to examine how uncertainty in labor trajectories of young workers affects transitions of the life course. The applied method is Kaplan-Meier survival analysis for four events: First job (1), first protected job (2), first perceptions of insecurity (3) and transition to second job (4). Results suggest that youth with precarious labor trajectories handles a great heterogeneity of transitions to adulthood, supporting the view that labor insecurity heightens the individualization of life course.

This paper extends the study of changes in time and inequalities by gender and socioeconomic level at the moment when three cohorts of Mexican men and women got their first stable job. A statistical analysis that allows specifying the relationship of these three axes: cohorts, gender and socioeconomically status with the transition to the first job had not been done until this paper. Moreover, this text analyses the socio demographic factors associated to this transition. We use life course theory and the concept of transitions to study this topic. Also life tables and two logistic models were elaborated.
The present research indicates that over the other axes, gender had a fundamental position in this transition because men and women continued making this transition following the traditional division of labor. It can be observed not only in the median ages when they got a job, that are different for each sexes, but also in their respective proportion of laboral participation and in the kind of job that they got for their first time.
Although differences between men and women by socioeconomic level were not statistically significant, this paper shows that gender inequalities conjugated with socioeconomic differences were disadvantages for certain groups.

Child labour is a serious social issue and globally, millions of children continue to work, putting at stake their education, health, normal development to adulthood, and even their lives. Basic objective of the study is to know the statewise prevelance of child labour in India and to explore the health status, substance abuse and causes of child labour in Delhi city. For this study, both primary and secondary data sources were used. Results reveal that Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar have highest prevalence of child labour in the country. Most of the children are working in agricultural (68 percent), manufacturing (17 percent), trade and hotel (9 percent) sector in India. Despite having legislation against child labour, children are continued to be engaged in significant numbers in hazardous and non-hazardous sectors. It has been found that majority of child labour’s heath status is in poor state and are living in very unhealthy conditions in Delhi as well as more than half of the children are using any type of substances in Delhi. Major causes of child labour in Delhi are forced worker, family poverty, illiteracy, orphan hood. Correlation analysis depicts that child labour has a significant association with poverty, unemployment, school attendance ratio.

There is much talk of the youth bulge in Pakistan with over 20 per cent of the population, equalling around 40 million, aged 15-24 years. This discourse, however, in most cases misses the inequality in opportunities available to youth that can hinder their successful transition to adulthood. This can have consequences, economic, social and political, not only for the individual but also for the country. An analysis of the HIES shows that 39 per cent of the youth in Pakistan are disconnected from both employment and educational opportunities, with the rates being higher for females and rural areas than for males and urban areas, respectively. Regional differences are also evident among the four provinces, as are those shown by varying household income levels. Educational disconnect seem to mire both, working and non-working youth, with one-third having never been to school. Low end jobs adopted by the working youth are a clear manifestation of this trend. Youth’s own future and that of the country, which aims to achieve the ‘demographic dividend’, are at stake with such high levels of disconnect. Serious steps need to be taken to engage these youth and consequently help manage the negative socio-political and economic impact the country might have to face otherwise.

China, having undergone unprecedented socioeconomic transformation and state policy interventions since the Chinese Communist Party took over in 1949, provides a fascinating laboratory for studying how lives of young people have been shaped by different historical contexts. Preliminary evidence based on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) suggest that today’s young Chinese are exploring new pathways to adulthood, including cohabitation and premarital sex. Using the 2008 CGSS data, we propose a holistic approach of examining the transitions to adulthood by employing the optimal matching technique. This method takes into account multiple trajectories simultaneously, and allows us to investigate further the orderliness and disorderliness of lives of Chinese young adults.

We examine the work history and transition to adulthood among early school leavers. We use retrospective data from a sub-sample of young adults (20-34) residing in Greater Jakarta who ever dropped out of school at age 16 or below (N=799). It is commonly assumed that early school leavers would spend the rest of their formative years working as a child labourer. However, our sequence analysis of the work and education history of early school leavers reveals this is not always the case. Less than a quarter of early school leavers worked in the immediate year following school exit. In contrast, about 30 per cent spent neither worked nor studied between the ages 12-18. Upon identifying that that a small number of respondents eventually managed to return to school, we found that father’s education and sex were the main predictors of school re-entry. Among those with early work experience, the top three occupations were workers in the processing/manufacturing industry, domestic servants/babysitters, and as informal traders. Finally, we found that early school leavers progressed faster into leaving parental home, marriage and parenthood relative to those who left school at ages 17-19.