Jobs and youth unemployment: it's bad, but not as bad as you might think

The UK's rate of unemployment has just hit 8 per cent and the number of people unemployed has risen to 2.5 million. According to researchers at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), while these figures are bad, they are not as bad as might be expected given the large fall in output in the current recession, the worst decline of any other post-war recession. Young people, however, have fared much worse than other groups with larger increases in their unemployment and bigger falls in hours and wages than for adults. The CEP researchers argue that, unfortunately, this is to be expected as young people always suffer worst during downturns. It does not seem that (relatively) they are doing particularly badly in the latest recession compared with the 1980s and 1990s recessions. More worrying, however, is that the fact that youth unemployment and numbers of NEETs (young people 'not in employment, education or training') were bad going into the recession, having been rising since 2004.