In Latin America and East Asia, where industrial development is more advanced, people forced off the land have a better chance of finding jobs in the informal sector. But in Latin America, over the past two decades, the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programmes, privatisation and enterprise restructuring have resulted in increasing unemployment. In East Asia, for three decades up to 1997, job opportunities expanded, and poverty declined. There are at present one billion people in the world between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And more than half of those are neither at school nor at work.
Youth unemployment is also a problem for the developed countries.
Young people make up half the forty million unemployed in the developed world as a whole. Moreover, most of them are long-term unemployed, whose chances of finding work diminish with every passing month. Many give up even registering as job seekers. This is a terrible waste of human potential. Only when most young people find regular, productive jobs can a society hope to solve many of its other problems, from poverty in general to drug abuse, criminality and emigration.