Introduction: The Problem of Youth Unemployment
Most young Sri Lankans find it hard to get good jobs: educated young people make up a third of Sri Lanka’s unemployed, while young workers in informal employment account for a third of the total workforce. Although unemployment levels in Sri Lanka have halved during the past decade, with the largest decrease among young people, nearly 80 percent of all unemployed in 2006 were youth. Of these, roughly a third had at least 10 years of schooling. Sri Lanka’s youth unemployment rate in 2006—at 16.8 percent—was nearly eight times higher than the adult unemployment rate of 1.2 percent. This figure is high by international standards: for example, Thailand’s ratio of unemployed youth (15–24 years) to unemployed adults was 6 to 1; Indonesia’s, 5.6 to 1; and the Philippines’, 3.4 to 1.1 High unemployment is not the only labor problem facing Sri Lanka’s youth: even among the employed, youth between ages 15 and 30 accounted for 45 percent of informal employment, or roughly 30 percent of total employment (Gunatilaka 2008). Informal employment typically offers no job security and little possibility for advancement in either pay or skills. The acute shortage of good jobs has been blamed for contributing to the civil unrest that has plagued Sri Lanka for several decades. As Harini Amarasuriya argues in her chapter on discrimination and social exclusion 1