IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/wbk/wbpubs/2451.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

The Challenge of Youth Employment in Sri Lanka

Author

Listed:
  • Ramani Gunatilaka
  • Markus Mayer
  • Milan Vodopivec

Abstract

Sri Lanka has been regarded as a model of a country with successful social policies, yet for decades it has faced major challenges in providing employment and satisfying other aspirations of youth. Although the labor force has become more educated, and this trend is particularly marked for youth, the main source of employment for both youth and adults remains the informal sector. Moreover, the importance of the informal sector as a source of employment has increased since the mid-1990s. On the positive side, unemployment declined in last decades, particularly for youth. The Sri Lankan government has continually acted on various fronts to address the youth unemployment problem. It has tried to improve and modernize Sri Lanka's general education system, which has long been criticized as too academic, and to increase the accessibility of training so as to promote the employability youth leaving school. Other actions included strengthening entrepreneurship programs and introducing career guidance and counseling and improving labor market information to help young people in their job searches and to guide human resource planning. In 2007, the government developed the National Action Plan for youth employment, built, for the first time, on a coherent youth employment policy framework and deriving an encompassing and consistent set of policy recommendations. The plan was based on in-depth analysis of Sri Lanka's labor market, provided via a series of background papers undertaken under the auspices of the Youth Employment Network (YEN). To provide the richness and comprehensiveness of this analysis in its totality, these papers, updated and revised, are collected in the present book. This book offers a wealth of valuable advice to the government and other stakeholders to achieve this goal. By exploiting the full potential of the youth, not only will their talent, aspirations, and energy be harnessed to advance economic growth, but also the existing inequities will be reduced and, hopefully in the longer run, eliminated.

Suggested Citation

  • Ramani Gunatilaka & Markus Mayer & Milan Vodopivec, 2010. "The Challenge of Youth Employment in Sri Lanka," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 2451.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbpubs:2451
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2451/544340PUB0EPI010BOX0349415B1PUBLIC1.pdf?sequence=1
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anna Lukiyanova, 2015. "Earnings inequality and informal employment in Russia," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 23(2), pages 469-516, April.
    2. Takeshi Aida, 2020. "Revisiting suicide rate during wartime: Evidence from the Sri Lankan civil war," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(10), pages 1-20, October.
    3. Gunatilaka, Ramani., 2013. "To work or not to work? : Factors holding women back from market work in Sri Lanka," ILO Working Papers 994838403402676, International Labour Organization.
    4. Amrita Sharma & Prakash C. Bhattarai & Anthony John Onwuegbuzie, 2023. "Quest of employability of engineering students: an explanatory sequential mixed methods research study," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 57(5), pages 3991-4011, October.
    5. repec:ilo:ilowps:483840 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Madhavi Bandara, 2023. "Demographic Characteristics of Recently Migrated Sri Lankan Youths for Foreign Jobs," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 7(10), pages 638-648, October.
    7. Athula Ranasinghe & Sunimalee Madurawala & Jen Je Su & Thushara Senadeera, 2016. "An empirical investigation of labor shortage in the manufacturing sector in Sri Lanka," Discussion Papers in Economics economics:201605, Griffith University, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics.
    8. Vagisha Gunasekara, 2015. "Unpacking the Middle: A Class-based Analysis of the Labour Market in Sri Lanka," Southern Voice Occasional Paper 22, Southern Voice.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbpubs:2451. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tal Ayalon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.