The Challenge of Youth Employment inSri Lanka

Gunatilaka, Ramani ; Mayer, Markus ; Vodopivec, Milan

World Bank

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    ACTIVE LABOR;    ACTIVE LABOR MARKET;    ACTIVE LABOR MARKET PROGRAMS;    AGE GROUP;   

DOI  :  10.1596/978-0-8213-8117-5
RP-ID  :  54434

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Sri Lanka has been regarded as a modelof a country with successful social policies, yet fordecades it has faced major challenges in providingemployment and satisfying other aspirations of youth.Although the labor force has become more educated, and thistrend is particularly marked for youth, the main source ofemployment for both youth and adults remains the informalsector. Moreover, the importance of the informal sector as asource of employment has increased since the mid-1990s. Onthe positive side, unemployment declined in last decades,particularly for youth. The Sri Lankan government hascontinually acted on various fronts to address the youthunemployment problem. It has tried to improve and modernizeSri Lanka's general education system, which has longbeen criticized as too academic, and to increase theaccessibility of training so as to promote the employabilityyouth leaving school. Other actions included strengtheningentrepreneurship programs and introducing career guidanceand counseling and improving labor market information tohelp young people in their job searches and to guide humanresource planning. In 2007, the government developed theNational Action Plan for youth employment, built, for thefirst time, on a coherent youth employment policy frameworkand deriving an encompassing and consistent set of policyrecommendations. The plan was based on in-depth analysis ofSri Lanka's labor market, provided via a series ofbackground papers undertaken under the auspices of the YouthEmployment Network (YEN). To provide the richness andcomprehensiveness of this analysis in its totality, thesepapers, updated and revised, are collected in the presentbook. This book offers a wealth of valuable advice to thegovernment and other stakeholders to achieve this goal. Byexploiting the full potential of the youth, not only willtheir talent, aspirations, and energy be harnessed toadvance economic growth, but also the existing inequitieswill be reduced and, hopefully in the longer run, eliminated.