Ethiopia KILM

Youth unemployment KILM 10
in the same direction, and should be looked at in tandem, as well as with other indicators now
available for the youth cohort, in order to assess fully the situation of young people within the labour
market and guide policy initiatives.
In a country where the youth unemployment rate is high and the ratio of the youth unemployment
rate to the adult unemployment rate is close to one, it may be concluded that the problem of
unemployment is not specific to youth, but is country-wide. When both indicators are high, young
people suffer more difficulties in finding a job than do adults. The problem of unemployment is
unequally distributed when, in addition to a high youth unemployment rate, the proportion of youth
unemployment in total unemployment is high. In this case, employment policies might usefully be
directed towards easing the entry of young people into the world of work.
Limitations
One major limitation is the source used in deriving unemployment rates. The main difficulty with
using population censuses as the source is that, owing to their cost, they are not undertaken
frequently and the information on unemployment is unlikely to be up-to-date. An additional point
should be made regarding the definition of unemployment.
Although less important than other factors, mention should be made of differences in the age groups
utilized, because the age limits applied for both youth and adults may vary across countries. Other
limitation when we measure this indicator is the reference period of information collected.
Trends
Youth unemployment rate, Ratio of youth unemployment rate to adult unemployment rate, Share of
youth unemployment to total unemployed and Share of youth unemployed to youth population are
given in table 15 below. It appears from the table that, youth unemployment rate of the country was
relatively low in1994 (5.3%) and high in 1999 (11.9%) and afterwards showed a declining trend i.e.,
7.9% in 2005 and 5.4% in 2007.
As one can see from the same table, throughout the period being considered, youth unemployment
rates were higher for male youth than their female counterparts. However, the margin of difference
in the youth unemployment rates between the two sexes has decreased from 10.4 percentage point in
1999 to 0.9 points in 2007.
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