The 2007 World Development Report focuses on youth around the world.

Emmanuel Jimenez, Director of Human Development in the World Bank's East Asia and the Pacific Department, was team leader on the 2007 World Development Report (WDR) "Development and the Next Generation." Released in September 2006, this report conducted one of the largest consultations on record for a WDR, involving 3,000 young people in focus groups from 26 developing countries. It contains graphs, charts, and detailed information about youth ages 12 to 24 in developing countries. A native of the Philippines, Mr. Jimenez manages World Bank staff working in the field on education and health issues. Before joining the World Bank, he was on the faculty of the economics department at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. An archived live chat with Mr. Jimenez and François Bourguignon, the Bank's Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, Development Economics, is available here.

Q: Why did the World Bank choose youth as a focus for the 2007 World Development Report?

Like all World Bank reports, the 2007 WDR is concerned about what can be done to help countries reduce poverty and grow. By focusing on youth, this year's report makes the case that developing the skills of young people is important not just for youth. It is also critical if countries are going to make further progress in poverty reduction and growth. Since our audience is primarily the finance ministers of countries who are concerned about resource allocations, we're trying to convince them that it's in their economic interests to establish policies that benefit youth today so that their countries will be stronger in the future.

The 2007 World Development Report is concerned about what can be done to help countries reduce poverty and grow. By focusing on youth, this year's report makes the case that developing the skills of young people is important not just for youth.

What is new about this report is that it focuses attention on an age range of 12 to 24. This is primarily for two reasons. First, past success leads to new challenges. In the last 30 years there has been enormous progress worldwide in children completing primary school. Our questions now are different. Are there enough secondary school or university places for these young people? Did they learn enough? Did they learn what they needed to know? Are there jobs? Young people who survived childhood diseases prevalent 30 years ago are now confronting diseases that never existed before, like HIV/AIDS, just as they are achieving sexual maturity or might be experimenting with drugs. Secondly, with 1.3 billion young people between the ages of 12 and 24, this is the largest cohort of this age in the history of the world. Because fertility has gone down in most developing countries, except for a handful of African countries and some in the Pacific, that number will not go up by much in the years ahead. So what we have is a population pyramid with fewer and fewer really young children, with this bulge now in the 12-24 age range. The bulge will have enormous impact on the world as these people live out their life expectancies of 60-70 years in most developing countries.

Does the WDR also have a message for youth?

We want this WDR to raise awareness among youth about development issues and their potential roles in their countries. As a result, for the first time, we have created film clips about the WDR, as well as an interactive website designed for youth that includes slide shows, games, and e-discussions. We even asked youth for titles for the report. Some of the suggestions were "WDR: The Young Developing Power of the World" and "WDR: A Slight Difference, We Hope!" MTV had the report posted on its website, and the BBC is discussing it on its series Generation Next in early December. It has been a very interesting process for the World Bank.

It's also important to involve young people in the consultative process of designing policies that affect youth. If young people are inexperienced at work, they will also be inexperienced about policies but there are some important lessons that we have learned. For example, youths in their upper teens and 20s have been consulted, if not in decision-making, at least in informing them about legislation that would affect their lives. In the Brazilian state of Ceara, a Swedish-finance project trained 50 young people about the state budget-making process. Young people participated in a debate about the budget, subsequently proposing 33 amendments. Two of the amendments were actually adopted by the legislature, which is not bad. In the end, the process was almost as important as the results because it changed the mindset of the legislature.

Won't this bulge put enormous constraints on developing countries?

For the first time, we have created film clips about the WDR, as well as an interactive website designed for youth that includes slide shows, games, and e-discussions.

Some people see this as a real threat. They ask how are we going to employ this large number of people. But we're saying that this could be an enormous opportunity for developing countries. This generation will provide a very large cohort of future workers at a time when they will have fewer dependents because fertility will remain low. Dependency rates are falling in countries around the world, i.e., the number of people who are not working relative to the number who are. This will give developing countries an enormous advantage for another 30 to 60 years. For instance, the growth of the East Asian Tigers in the 1980s provides some important lessons. It is estimated that up to one-quarter or one-third of the growth in those regions was due simply to demographic shifts to a younger population. When it occurred, not all institutions or governments were able to take advantage by establishing new policies. What we're saying in this report is that developing the human capital now for this cohort of 12-24 year olds-and deploying it well-are key to ensuring that countries take advantage of this window of opportunity.

What are the major themes of the report?

Building skills that will be useful for poverty reduction is more cost effective when people are still young, rather than learning them as adults. Therefore, we have organized the report around five youth transitions experienced by young people in both developed and developing countries. These are: 1) leaving primary school at age 12; 2) transitioning to full-time work around age 24; 3) developing healthy lifestyles and avoiding risks; 4) forming families and learning parenting skills; and 5) learning the habits of active citizenship and civic engagement. Since young people have greater propensity to migrate and to use new technology, we also looked at how people transition across borders. As a result, sections of the report address youth migration and the use of information and communication technologies by young people. Much of our data and charts come from the consultative process in 40 countries that we used to prepare this report.

Within each of these transitions, we focus on three broad directions that we think policies ought to take: 1) increasing opportunities for young people to develop and deploy their human capital, or skills; 2) developing the capability of youth to choose among those opportunities; and 3) ensuring them a second-chance in the event that some of the choices made for or by them lead to poor outcomes.

How do these youth transitions impact poverty reduction in developing countries?

The principle of developing human capital is well-established in the literature as key to poverty reduction. We know that building country infrastructure is not enough, that countries need to help their citizens evolve new skills. Our hope is that countries will enter into policies around these five youth transitions that will enable young people to make long-term contributions to the countries' well-being. In some countries, this will be hard to do because things have always been one way. But the world labor market is changing rapidly. Countries know that they have to adapt.

We have organized the report around five youth transitions experienced by young people ... our hope is that countries will enter into policies around these five youth transitions that will enable young people to make long-term contributions to the countries' well-being.

For instance, youth unemployment is high everywhere because young people are inexperienced workers and have more difficulty finding work than adults. So, we asked, what are those policies and institutions that help young people make this transition? Why are some countries more successful than others in helping young people transition to work? Another example has to do with the quality of primary education that children are receiving in developing countries. We found that less than 60% of young women from Guinea who have finished primary school could read a sentence in their own language. This is an indictment about the quality of the schooling, something that national policy can address. Relevance of schooling is another concern. Employers are saying that, despite so many more educated young people, they still don't know what employers need them to know. They need young people who have problem-solving skills and can apply what they know to different situations because the economy is changing so rapidly. They also need to know simple things like work habits, such as showing up on time or working in teams.

What are some examples of policies that benefit youth?

Countries can establish economic policies that give young people more work opportunities. For instance, we found that industries that are heavily export-oriented such as textiles and electronics employ young people at about twice the rate of other industries. These are not always skilled jobs, but they provide employment for inexperienced young people who have fewer skills. On the other hand, there is also a high demand for young people in areas like the electronics industry where creativity is valued. It's important for young people not to end up in dead-end jobs. For instance, in Penang in Malaysia, it was the employment of young women in the electronics field that drove the electronic revolution in that country in the 1970s and 1980s. International and local investors began employing young women to assemble calculators, for example. There are some cultural stereotypes about young women being more suitable for this work because they are more patient and able to concentrate better on detailed handwork. But these jobs provide one step up the skill ladder that enabled young women to climb out of poverty.

Another example is what is happening in some developed countries. In order to compete in the world market, many are learning that they must have more flexible labor markets. But it is very hard to change regulations once in place. Attempts to give employers greater incentive to hire inexperienced young people in France, for example, have been perceived by some youths as making them more vulnerable to being fired while other parts of the labor force remain rigidly protected, resulting in street protests. For better or worse, developing countries usually do not have such social protection regulations. They can learn from these experiences as they create regulations that help youth.

If a country sees that its youth are migrating to countries that have more favorable policies for youth, the country may be persuaded to make changes in its own policies.

Is there a threat that young people will migrate to countries where regulations are more favorable for them?

We conducted a survey that asked youth in several countries if they would like to work overseas. The majority said that they would. What's interesting is that, when we asked how many of them would like to live permanently overseas, only a small minority said they would. This generation of young people is different from those who migrated 100 years ago. They are not necessarily looking to migrate or to settle in other countries but want job opportunities to help them support their families back home. They want to travel back and forth. However, if you restrict mobility, it's so costly for them to try to make it back that they will probably just stay. Temporary worker programs might be a better solution. On the other hand, if countries put up high barriers such as making it costly to get a passport, young people will be even more vulnerable because they will enter a country anyway but they will do it illegally.

If a country sees that its youth are migrating to countries that have more favorable policies for youth, the country may be persuaded to make changes in its own policies. This will take time, but there are examples. For instance, look at South Korea. Thirty years ago, many Koreans were seeking opportunities to live and work abroad. Now most are staying put; we can hardly recruit them to work at the World Bank outside of Korea. In India in the past five years, there's been a huge diaspora of highly skilled people returning to the country. As Indians, they are eager to have the opportunity to develop their careers in their own country.




Reprinted with permission from Development Gateway.

To read another Global Envision article about the World Bank, see The IMF and World Bank: An Overview.



Return to top