黄君李

危机重重 ：在本轮经济大萧条开始前已经居高不下的全球青年失业率，在过去两年中，更暴涨到惊人的地步。虽然几乎所有国家青年失业率都增加了，但是各国增加的幅度有很大不同，往往反映了该国青年从学校过度到工作的具体情况。许多国家开始认真讨论这一情形导致的潜在的＂伤痕效应＂。如果要让一代人免于长期背负此次危机的包袱的话，我们需要这种严肃的讨论。
    在突尼斯，人们管失业青年叫“hittistes”（法属阿拉伯国家习语，专指靠墙站着的人们）。在埃及，人们说 “shabab atileen”，意即无业青年。在英国，他们被叫作“NEETs”， “不在读、不在职、不受训”之意。在日本，他们被叫做“freeters”，取英文自由职业一词前半部分与德语工人一词后半部分合成。西班牙人管他们叫“mileuristas”，即月收入不到一千欧元的人。在美国，那些大学毕业后找不到工作搬回家住的人被称作＂回飞镖＂青年。
    国际劳工组织撰写的《全球就业趋势》报告说： 2011年全球有七千四百八十万年龄在15至24岁的青年没有工作 ，这个数字较2007年增加了四百多万。目前全球青年失业率在12.7%，依然较危机前高出整整一个百分点。在全球范围内，青年失业率几乎是成年人的3倍。此外，据估计有640万青年对找工作失去希望，完全退出了劳动力市场。
    吉尔罗•黑菊（Zero Hedge）写道：欧洲青年失业率自1994年九月以来首次突破22%。大卫•贝尔（David Bell）和大卫•布兰齐浮劳儿（David Blanchflower）在最近的一期IZA【译注：总部在德国波恩的一家私营的、独立的经济研究机构，全称“劳动力研究所”】报纸上指出：几乎所有国家青年失业率都上升了，但是 各国上升的幅度却大不相同 。经历房地产价格大幅下跌的国家如西班牙、拉特为亚、立陶宛和爱尔兰，增幅最明显。相反，在匈牙利、丹麦、德国和荷兰，青年失业率仍然保持在相对低位。
    雪上加霜
    哈南•摩西（Hanan Morsy)在最近一期《财政与发展》【译注：国际货币基金组织的刊物】中写道： 自从2008年爆发全球经济危机以来，在失业率增幅方面，青年较年纪稍长者要高得多。经济合作与发展组织一份最近的论文用以下图表说明：这一模式并不奇怪，因为较之成年人失业率，青年失业率往往对经济周期更为敏感。
    马可•阿纽之埃塔（Macro Annuziata）在VoxEU网站【译注：欧洲一个机构名叫经济政策研究中心（The 。青年被抛出劳动力市场的速度让人害怕。但是欧洲忍受青年高失业率的时间之长也同样让人心惊。听上去你会觉得不可思议：意大利选民在过去四十年忍受着高达30%的青年失业率；西班牙则是32%。在西班牙经济高速增长的那些年里，其国内青年失业率平均在28%；只有三年降到20%以下，其中“最佳表现”年份是2006年，青年失业率为18%。
    一代人的“伤痕效应”
    《商业周刊》的文章说： 将来工作机会增多的时候，雇主们可能会跳过今天的失业者而从下一批刚刚毕业的新鲜面孔中挑人。在经济危机中开始求职会给人带来长期的、负面的后果。耶鲁管理学院的经济学家莉莎•B. 侃（Lisa B. Kahn）的估计认为：在美国，对于一个白人男性大学生来说，毕业时失业率每增加一个百分点，他的起步工资会降低6%至7%。在一项使用包括长达30年收入的社会保险记录长期数据的研究中，提尔。凡。瓦器忒等人（Till von Wachter and al.)在2009年提出了第一个对1982年经济萧条中裁员对美国的影响的评估。他们发现：就业者蒙受了年收入缩减高达30%的直接损失。经过15到20年，他们收入的损失依然维持在20%；因此工人的生活资源出现了巨大的退步。
    史蒂文•希尔（Steven Hill）写道： 青年失业的伤痕效应在法国不像在英国和许多其他国家那么持久 。他根据的是麦希尔德•盖尼（Mathilde Gaini），奥德•勒杜克（Aude Leduc ）和 奥古斯丁•魏卡德（Augustin Vicard）的一项研究。该研究考查了法国在1982年和2009年间进入劳动力市场的青年人口。他们发现：这些“不幸”在经济萧条中完成学业的青年就业率较低，常常做兼职和临时工，但是在三年之内就能赶上那些“幸运”的青年。
    阿伦•比提（Alan Beattie）写道: 西班牙青年中的一半人没有领失业救济金 。失业率衡量的不是社会上某个年龄段的的人中——在这里是15和24岁之间——想要工作却找不到工作的人的比例。失业率衡量的是这类人占劳动力人口（即有工作的和正在找工作的人数）的比例，而完全忽略了那些正在读书和培训的人。在西班牙，这个差距非常大。因为不论经济是否萧条，都有很多西班牙人上大学，并且很多人花很长时间才毕业。他认为：一个更好的衡量工作机会多少的指标是15-24岁青年中不在职、不在读、不受训的“NEETs"人数的比例。如果用这个指标，西班牙”名列前茅“，但是也只比欧共体平均值高几个百分点，却比经济合作与发展组织成员国的平均值低。希腊的情况类似。
    例外的德国与移民的减压功能
    马可•阿纽之埃塔（Macro Annuziata）写道： 德国青年失业率也比前几代人高，不过也只刚刚过了8%。德国人在教育和工业间有更好的协作，包括通过学徒计划的协作，收效显著。
    格利特•魏志猛（Gerrit Wiesmann）在《金融时报》上说，在德国，青年失业率一直徘徊在比整体失业率高两到三个百分点的范围内，而在法国或西班牙，青年失业率通常都是整体失业率的两到三倍。一个普遍的看法：德国相对低的青年失业率的根本原因在于雇主和青少年对该国的职业培训体系几十年来的坚持。 德国学徒计划：“Duales Ausbildungssystem”，也就是双重培训系统（指的是混合了读书和实践经验） ，可以回溯到1969年职业教育领域的全面检讨，不过其根源在于古老的行会制度。美国、印度和其它一些国家在研究它，考虑基于这一模型的政策。事实证明：要复制这一模式不容易。
    杰米•史密斯（Jamie Smyth）写道： 在爱尔兰，出国移民潮再次来势凶猛 。去年，有76，400人移民，自爱尔兰经济萧条以来，出国移民的总人口已经达到了25万。彼得•崴兹（Peter Wise） 写道：葡萄牙一千万人口中仅去年就有12至15万人移民。移民潮已经达到了和上个世纪六七十年代一样的顶峰水平，那时候葡萄牙一波又一波的贫困工人移民前往北欧和美洲。不同的是：上一波移民潮中工人大多没受过多少教育，而今天的移民很多都有大学文凭。


Global youth employment crisis
(南宁翻译）
What’s at stake: The global youth unemployment rate, which was already high before the start of the Great Recession, has reached skyrocketing levels in the past two years. While youth unemployment rates have increased in almost all countries, there has been wide divergence in the size of this increase – often reflecting the country specific aspects of the transition from school to work. For most, if not all, a serious discussion about the potential “scarring effects” induced by such a situation appears, however, warranted if we want to avoid having one generation permanently bear the burden of this crisis.
The youth unemployment bomb
Peter Coy writes in a special Business Week report that the youth unemployment bomb is global. In Tunisia, there called the hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths. ­In Britain, they are NEETs—"not in education, employment, or training." In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1, 000 euros a month. In the U.S., they''re "boomerang" kids who move back home after college because they can''t find work.
Source: Financial Times.
The International Labor Organization writes in its Global Employment Trends report that in 2011, 74.8 million youth aged 15–24 were unemployed, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. The global youth unemployment rate, at 12.7 per cent, remains a full percentage point higher than the pre-crisis level. Globally, young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. In addition, an estimated 6.4 million young people have given up hope of finding a job and have dropped out of the labor market altogether.
Zero Hedge writes that the Euro-zone youth unemployment rate is back over 22% for the first time since September 1994. David Bell and David Blanchflower point in a recent IZA paper that while youth unemployment rates have increased in almost all countries, there has been wide divergence in the size of this increase. Particularly large increases have occurred in countries that have suffered house price declines crises such as Spain, Latvia, Lithuania and Ireland. In contrast, youth unemployment has remained relatively low in Austria, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
From bad to worse
Hanan Morsy writes in a recent issue of F&D (HT Marco Annunziata) that since the global crisis began in 2008, young people have suffered a much sharper rise in joblessness than older workers. A recent OECD paper illustrates (see graph below) that this pattern is not unusual, as youth unemployment tends to be more responsive to the cycle than adult unemployment
Source: OECD
Marco Annunziata writes in VoxEU that the rise in youth unemployment looks largely like a reversion to the mean. The speed at which young people have been thrown out of the labor market is frightening. But equally frightening is how long Europe has lived with high youth unemployment. Implausible as it sounds, Italian voters have put up with an average youth unemployment rate of 30% for the last 40 years; Spanish voters with a rate of 32%. During the impressive years of Spanish growth, the youth unemployment rate averaged 28%; it was below 20% for just three years, with a “best performance” of 18% in 2006.
The scarring effects on a generation
Business week writes that when jobs do come back, employers might choose to reach past today''s unemployed and pick from the next crop of fresh-faced grads. Starting one''s career during a recession can have long-term negative consequences. Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management, estimates that for white, male college students in the U.S., a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate at the time of graduation causes an initial wage loss of 6 percent to 7 percent. In a study that uses longitudinal data from Social Security records covering up to 30 years of earnings, Till von Wachter and al. (2009) present the first national estimates of the long-term cost of job displacements during the 1982 recession. They find large immediate losses in annual earnings of 30%. After 15 to 20 years, these losses are still 20% and thus represent a significant setback in workers’ lifetime resources.
Steven Hill writes that studies of scars left by youth unemployment in France do not show the persistence generally found in the UK and many other countries. The author refers to a study by Mathilde Gaini, Aude Leduc and Augustin Vicard that uses the French labor force surveys for the cohorts entering the labor market between 1982 and 2009. The authors find that "nlucky" young people completing their studies during a recession have lower employment rates, are more often part-time and temporary workers, but catch-up with "lucky" one within 3 years.
Alan Beattie writes that half of young Spaniards are not on the dole. The unemployment rate doesn’t measure the percentage of people of a given age – in this case 15-24 – who want a job and can’t get one. It measures those people as a percentage of the labor force – people either in employment or searching for a job – and ignores all those in education or training. In Spain that’s quite a big difference: recession or no, a lot of Spaniards go to college and often take a long time to get round to graduating. A better measure of the failure to create jobs is the percentage of young people aged 15-24 that are not in employment, education or training (NEETs). According to that measure Spain is towards the top, but only a few percentage points above the EU average and actually below the OECD average. Greece shows a similar pattern.
German exceptionalism and emigration as a safety valve
Marco Annunziata writes that Germany’s youth also have a higher unemployment rate than older generations, but their rate is just over 8%. Germany’s better coordination between the school system and industry, including via its apprenticeship programmes, pays off.
Gerrit Wiesmann notes in the FT that youth unemployment in Germany has hovered two to three points above total unemployment, while in France or Spain it has regularly run at two or three times the jobless rate. The decades-old commitment of bosses and teenagers to the German vocational training system is widely regarded as the secret behind the country’s relatively low youth unemployment rate. The German apprenticeship programme – Duales Ausbildungssystem, or dual training system (the name refers to its mix of book learning and hands-on experience) – which dates back to an overhaul of vocational training in 1969 but has roots in old guild system has led the US, India and other countries to study it as a possible model for their own policies. But it has proved difficult to copy.
Jamie Smyth writes that emigration is back with a vengeance in Ireland. Last year 76, 400 people emigrated, bringing the number of people who have left the country since the Irish recession began to 250, 000. Peter Wise writes that with an estimated 120, 000-150, 000 people leaving a country of 10m last year, emigration has now surged back to the peak levels of the 1960s and 1970s in Portugal, when waves of impoverished workers departed for northern Europe and the Americas. The difference this time is that, unlike the largely uneducated workforce that left then, many of today’s migrants are young graduates with university degrees.