II.
CURRENT GLOBAL TRENDS
The world in which we are living is very youthful: almost half of the current global population is under the age of 25. There are around 1.2 billion young people in the world today (19% of the global population), and the next generation of young people (children currently below the age of 15) will be half again as large, reaching 1.8 billion. In absolute numbers there are more young people than ever before and 85 per cent of them live in developing countries. Today the situation is alarming: a great many of these young people are excluded from growth and development. With 515 million young people living in poverty, 130 million illiterate, around 74 million unemployed, and 10 million living with HIV/AIDS, youth poverty or exclusion is a serious global problem. 1) A very youthful global population With more than a half of the population under the age of 25, youth is a crucial matter in today’s world. There are around 1.2 billion young people in the world today and the majority (almost 85%) of them live in developing countries, with approximately more than 60 percent in Asia alone. By 2025, the number of youth living in developing countries will grow to around 89%. According to the results of the 2008 Revision of the official world population estimates and projections prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, the demographic structure poses major challenges: “Currently, the population of the less developed regions is still young, with children under age 15 accounting for 30 per cent of the population and young persons aged 15-24 accounting for a further 19 per cent. In fact, in the less developed regions the number of children (at 1.6 billion) and the number of young people (at 1.0 billion) are both at all time highs, posing a major challenge to their countries, which are faced with the necessity of providing education and employment to large cohorts of children and youth even as the current economic and financial crisis unfolds. The situation in the least developed countries is even more pressing because children under age 15 constitute 40 per cent of their population and young people account for a further 20 per cent. In the more developed regions, children and youth account for just 17 per cent and 13 per cent of the population, respectively, and whereas the number of children is expected to change little in the future, remaining close to 200 million, the number of young people is projected to decrease from 163 million currently to 134 million in 2050. In both the more and the less developed regions, the number of people in the main working ages, 25 to 59, is at an all time high: 603 million and 2.4 billion, respectively. Yet, whereas in the more developed regions that figure is expected to peak over the next decade and decline thereafter, reaching 528 millions in 2050, in the less developed regions it will continue to rise, reaching 3.6 billion in 2050 and increasing by nearly half a billion over the next decade. These population trends justify the urgency of supporting employment creation in developing countries which should be part 20 of any strategy created to address the global economic crisis being experienced worldwide.�
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UNITED NATIONS (2008), Executive Summary, World Population Prospects, the 2008 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division
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