GENEVA, Switzerland, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- The International Labor Organization is calling for a combination of targeted and integrated policies to tackle skyrocketing youth unemployment.
The Geneva-based U.N. labor agency said Wednesday stemming the increase would significantly benefit the global economy.
"We are wasting an important part of the energy and talent of the most educated youth generation the world has ever had," ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said. "Enlarging the chances of young people to find and keep decent work is absolutely critical to achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals."
Those goals call for achieving a set of specific targets by 2015, including halving extreme poverty and hunger and slashing child and maternal mortality rates.
The ILO said young people aged 15 to 24 represent nearly half the world's jobless, although they are only 25 per cent of the working age population. Halving the world youth unemployment rate would add at least $2.2 trillion to global gross domestic product equal to around 4 per cent of the 2003 value, the agency said in a new analysis entitled "Global Employment Trends for Youth 2004."
