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An essay on youth unemployment from an unemployed educated Spanish youth

12/20/2015

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“The crisis is over,” declared Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy earlier this summer. We’ve heard this kind of announcements before. In fact, it seems like every September since the global financial crisis hit Spain in 2008, politicians of all colors and affiliations have promised an end to the prolonged economic grievances of the country. Perhaps what’s new this time is that politicians were not the only ones saying it: Major world think tanks have forecasted that Spain would increase its job market and have a positive growth rate of 3% by the end of the year.
Quartz (reproduced in its entireity)
With general elections set for Dec. 20, politicians are celebrating the economic forecast. The old-establishment parties are worried about losing the de facto bipartisan system; new parties are emerging criticizing the status quo and the ingrained corruption of the Spanish political system. Recent debates have focused on the welfare state model, labor reforms and the secessionist movement in Catalonia.

But no one is talking about the potentially one million (or more) Spaniards between the ages of 15 and 24 who can’t find a job. Or about those, like me, who have fled the country looking for better opportunities abroad.

Growing up is scary, but it’s even scarier when it feels like there are no job prospects—no matter how hard you study or how committed you are to the search. Or when your parents are fighting eviction, or moving back to their grandparents’ house because they can’t afford to pay their mortgage any more.

The impact of the crisis on the social fabric of Spain is undeniable. More than three million jobs have been destroyed since 2008 and most of these people still aren’t back on track; one in every four people in Spain remains unemployed toady. The numbers are even more dire for the country’s young people, with one in every two Spaniards in that critical 15 to 24 age group still unemployed.

I was just starting college when the crisis hit. My younger brother was about to enter high school. For the next six years, we saw both our parents lose their jobs; our aunts and uncles were laid-off; our friends, with their fresh university degrees, couldn’t find a place to work—not even for free. In just a few years, we found ourselves pushed two or three steps down the economic ladder and deprived of any sense of financial security. And our story was not unique, not by any means.

But whereas I was already in college, my brother and my cousins—just as most of my friends’ younger siblings—still had to decide what they would do with their future. But what’s to choose when there doesn’t seem to be any successful formula?

And if education doesn’t guarantee a job anymore, perhaps it is not surprising that Spain has the highest dropout rates in the European Union. A full 36% percent of 25 to 34 year olds haven’t finished their secondary education, compared to 11% of European Union citizens. And students from low socioeconomic background are twice as likely to be low performers or drop out.

So they choose to continue being children.

As Carles Ventura, a therapist in Spain who specializes in teenagers, put it, 16- and 17-years-olds especially are taking refuge in the crisis to cover up their fears of growing up. These young people are asking him how to find motivation in their studies. “At first, the easy thing to say is ‘the crisis is so big, I won’t find a job,’” Ventura tells Quartz. But he added there are wider, deeper issues that underpin these fears, including a systemic lack of confidence and a general fear of growing up.

“Young people know that the crisis makes it more difficult to them,” Ventura says. “They’ve been studying for a while, and they know it’s still going to be a while until they find a job, and now that is not even guaranteed.”

More than 25% of Spaniards in that 15 to 24 age group are actually doing nothing; they are not studying, training or employed—one of the highest rates in the developed world. This is very problematic: Researchshows that lack of employment during adolescence generally translates to lower employment rates in adulthood.

It’s not surprising then that a recent study (link in Spanish) conducted by IE University found that the defining characteristic for young adults in Spain is that they are “uncertain about their future”—as opposed to the ubiquitous “oriented to the digital world” used to define teenagers elsewhere.

Rajoy, who’s running for reelection on Sunday, said recently (link in Spanish) “before, unemployment was rising every day, now it is going down every day.” Never mind that this is not true, (link in Spanish) Spaniards have stopped believing in it. A Pew Research survey shows that 80% of the population sees the economic situation as “bad.”

Unfortunately for those who continued studying after 2008 and have finished college in the past few years, what the future holds looks grim—at best. And if moving out of your parents house is the first step into adulthood, young Spaniards are still very much children--eight in every ten (link in Spanish) Spaniards under 30 still live with their parents.

“Paro, exilio, o precariedad”—unemployment, exile, or precariousness—has become something of a mantra for many disillusioned young Spaniards. And there are efforts to try and change the narrative. In 2011, waves of anti-austerity movements expanded across Europe. In Madrid, they spawned collectives like Juventudes Sin Futuro (“Youngsters Without a Future”). Roughly translating to Futureless Youth, the collective has created campaigns like “No nos vamos, nos echan,” Spanish for “We are not leaving, we are being kicked out.”

And yet youth unemployment has been barely represented in the general elections debates (only mentioning the need to bring back researchers and educated people from abroad). Even the left-wing party Podemos (“We Can”), whose constituency is made up of many of those unemployed youth, hasn’t made the issue a central point of its campaign. Since it garnered an unexpectedly high result in the 2014 European elections, Podemos has threatened the status quo of the traditional parties in Spain, getting enough power to steer public debate. And yet, of the 215 measures (link in Spanish) in their political platform, only two mention youth unemployment, addressing the issue in a tangential way.

Politicians might think the worst of the crisis is coming to an end, but some of us still don’t know if we’ll be able to make it back home. Or if the years put into educations will pay off with dignifying job. The impact of more than seven years of sustained job destruction will loom for years to come. As Spanish economist Manuel de la Rocha put it in an interview with the Financial Times on June 25, “We will get out of this crisis but there will be a generation that has been left behind. A lot of young people have seen their dreams and aspirations evaporate.”

Follow Mireia on Twitter at @mireiatriguero. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
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Graduates in China outpace job creation  -structural unemployment

12/3/2015

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Bloomberg
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” says 22-year-old Dang Lirong as she searches job postings for anything related to medicine at a Beijing employment fair.
“I took the major because I thought it would give me a good job,” Dang says, adjusting her black-frame glasses. After four years of toil at college in Hebei and a year interning at a Beijing hospital, she has yet to land full-time work.
Dang is among 7.5 million college graduates entering China’s job market this summer, the most ever and almost seven times the number in 2001. Their dreams are colliding with an economy growing at the slowest pace in a generation, adding pressure on policy makers to spur the employment-intensive services sector.
“Every year it’s the most difficult job-seeking season for graduates in history, and the next year is even more difficult,” said Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank. “The services sector isn’t developed enough to create enough effective demand for college grads.”
Compounding the challenge is a yawning skills gap between what the economy needs and what graduates want to do. The country’s services and innovation-led new economy is doing better than the polluting heavy industries of old, but they’re not expanding quickly enough to absorb the swelling ranks of aspiring attorneys, biologists and other young professionals.
Graduates last year most wanted to be secretaries, teachers, administrators, accountants and human resource managers, yet the top five needed by employers were salesmen, technicians, agents, customer service staff and waiters, according to a 2014 report from Peking University and the website ganji.com, which helps companies to hire.

The irony for China’s youth: the more educated you are, the tougher it is to find work. The unemployment rate for 16 to 25 year olds with a college degree or better was 5.6 percent in the first quarter, compared with 4.7 percent for those who didn’t finish high school, according to Gan Li, director of the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance and a professor at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu.

Jobs Mismatch“Only when more high-end services jobs, especially those in research and development, are created will the college employment problem be solved,” said 21st Century Education’s Xiong. China needs to further open the state-controlled media, telecommunication and finance sectors to absorb more educated workers, he said.

Virtual World’“College students these days just want to sit in front of a computer, working and living in a virtual world,” she said, having collected fewer than 10 resumes in four hours working her booth. “They should come to companies like ours and do a job that communicates with people, real people.”
Twenty-two-year old Guo Rui is among those who have bent the dreams of youth to match economic reality. After studying television production and working short stints at TV stations and newspapers, she ditched plans for a life on screen because the pay just didn’t cut it. She now works as a property sales agent in Beijing, earning about 20,000 yuan a month.
“You can’t settle for what’s stable and comfortable when you’re young,” she said. “You should follow the market.”

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Example of Chinese reform in energy sector

12/3/2015

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Seems to me that reforms are a power consolidation that picks winners and losers (like Putin did) and creates an shrunken oligargy loyal to Xi Jinping. I would therefore expect in the long run Chinese GDP per capita to converge to Russia's not South Korea's  or Japan's.

From Bloomberg. (Thanks Michael)
​
President Xi Jinping’s overhaul of China’s energy industry took a step forward as PetroChina Co. announced plans to unload $2.4 billion in Central Asian pipelines.
The country’s biggest energy producer will sell a 50 percent stake in Trans-Asia Gas Pipeline Co. to a unit of China Reform Holdings Corp., another state-owned company that acts as an investment firm charged with revamping government-run entities. Trans-Asia Gas Pipeline operates a 1,830 kilometer (1,140 mile) system that carries gas through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to China’s far western province Xinjiang.

China Reform was set up in 2010 by China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, an arm of the cabinet that controls the biggest government enterprises. It agreed last year to help restructure the coal-to-chemical business of Datang International Power Generation Co., bought 6 percent in China Tower Corp. earlier this year and has taken over some smaller state enterprises.
“We think this is a clear signal that China is more likely to establish a ‘National Gas Pipeline Entity’ to administer all the backbone pipeline assets,” Morgan Stanley analysts including Andy Meng said in a research report Thursday.
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Are Chinese reforms working?

12/3/2015

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From Quartz

Since the eighties, the Chinese central government has called for lower-level bureaus to reduce their headcount. But these cries for reform have seldom yielded the desired result. Because officials seldom get fired, older or incompetent ones typically are moved laterally but kept on the government’s payroll. As new officials are hired to take their place, the system gets larger, more expensive, and less efficient.
It is likely that applicants have stagnated, despite a dearth of good jobs for university graduates, because becoming a Chinese official has become a lot less cushy in recent years.
Picture
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Turkey is at the center of our middle eastern issues

12/3/2015

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If we arm the Kurds it is likely they will form their own state, which will carve territory out of Iraq Syria and Turkey.
Zerohedge.

Turkey's Geopolitical Value
“Who controls the food supply controls the people? who controls the energy can control whole continents? who controls money can control the world.”
      - Henry Kissinger
Europe’s energy dependency
Gas distribution is a powerful motive behind the Syrian war.
The biggest gas importer in the world is the European Union (EU), which invests around 263 billion dollars a year in this energy resource. Main exporters to Europe are Russia and Norway.
Due to the current Ukrainian conflict, dependency on Russia as the main gas supplier has become a risk for the national safety of the countries that comprise this political community.
Avoiding dependence of gas coming from Russian is a top priority for the European Union
The latter has exposed the need to build gas pipelines that are not under Russian control, reason why the European Union has been exploring alternatives to diversify the supply. Among their options, there are countries that have the world’s greatest gas reserves. On one hand, there are Eurasian countries like Iran and Qatar? on the other hand, there is the Caucasian region with territories such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
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Is the Trilemma a Dilemma?

12/2/2015

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Capital Ebbs and Flows
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