some interesting patterns and trends that could yield insights for education and labor policies in the region in several areas.

First, the note provides new information on the size of the nini problem. In the 15 countries for which we have harmonized household survey data through the extended SEDLAC database, 18.2 million youth between the ages of 15 and 24 were living as ninis in 2010. Scaling up this surveybased estimate to cover all the countries in the region yields an estimated 20.8 million ninis for the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole in 2015.

Latin America is not an outlier when it comes to the issue of ninis, however. Globally, there are close to 260 million youth both out of school and out of work, spread across regions. The share of ninis in Latin America, at about 19 percent, is roughly equal to the global average of 22 percent. The region with the highest share of ninis is the Middle East and North Africa, where one in three youth is out of school and out of work, while the lowest share is in high-income countries (11 percent).

Second, we provide information on the time trends of the nini phenomenon in Latin America. Increased prosperity over the past two decades has not solved the problem of ninis. For LAC as a whole, the percentage of youth who are ninis declined gradually between 1992 and 2010, but because the region’s youth population has increased, the _number_ of ninis has actually grown slightly. Unsurprisingly, nini trends have varied across the region, with some countries showing sharp declines in the percentages of ninis over the 1992-2010 period and others seeing small increases.

Third, we describe the characteristics of ninis. In gender terms, the nini phenomenon in LAC is largely a female phenomenon, but it is becoming more of a male problem over time. Women make up over two-thirds of ninis in LAC, but the number of male ninis jumped 46 percent between 1992 and 2010. As a result, males account for the entire regional increase in the absolute number of ninis over this period (1.8 million individuals). This surge, along with the documented correlation between male ninis and violence in some high-crime settings (De Hoyos, Gutierrez and Vargas 2015), may help explain the increased media and policy attention to Latin America’s ninis in recent years.

On average, ninis are both less educated and poorer than their peers. As the education level of the general population has risen, so has that of ninis. Nevertheless, around 60 percent of even the 19 to 24 year-old ninis have failed to complete secondary school, pointing to a problem of dropout or inadequate progression to upper secondary. In addition, ninis are increasingly concentrated among the poorest households. _A priori_ , this result is not obvious—it could be that only better-off youth can afford to be ninis—but the trend is unmistakable. In 1992, 36.8 percent of nini youth were in households in the three poorest deciles of the population, while half that number (18.9 percent) were in the three richest deciles. By 2010, the share of the three poorest deciles had grown to 45.1 percent of ninis, while the number in the three richest deciles had dropped to 13.5 percent. This high 24