The Causality Between Youth Unemployment, Education Attainment and Labour Force Participation: Evidence from South Africa

In times of increasing unemployment, South Africa has the highest youth unemployment in the world followed by Palestine, Greece, Nigeria and Spain. In that context, the study attempts to investigate causal relationship between youth unemployment and the economic indicators (education attainment and labour force participation) that ought to important signals to trends of unemployment. The paper will paper will make use of the Autoregressive Distributed Lags model (ARDL) as it is the most recommended to comparable time series models. The causality relationship among the variables is analyzed using Pair-wise Granger-causality technique. The study implication shows there is no efficient policies in South Africa to effectively reduce increasing youth unemployment given that education attainment study outcomes is insufficient.