Business, as usual: the policy priorities of the World Bank's discourses on youth unemployment, and the global financial crisis

Abstract

This article undertakes a detailed analysis of the formative role of the World Bank in the framing of youth unemployment. It charts the World Bank's emergence as a powerful political actor in this policy field and identifies the ideational content of its policy discourses on the causes of youth unemployment and responses to it. Four principal themes are identified: skills deficits; wage regulation; the “demographication” of explanations for burgeoning youth unemployment; and connections between youth unemployment, criminal activity and social disorder. The discussion highlights significant evidence of neo-liberal continuity and reinvention in World Bank discourses as its normative and ideational frameworks are extended to new terrains of analysis in ways that infer links between youth unemployment and individual deficits of the unemployed.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• global social policy
• youth unemployment
• neo-liberalism

Notes

No independent data on the fast-shifting global profile of youth unemployment are available. Such academic literature as exists is largely confined to national analyses and particular regional contexts – see, for example, Contini (2010) and O'Higgins (2012). The only exceptions (Bell & Blanchflower, 2011; Choudhry, Marelli, & Signorelli, 2012; Elder, 2010; O'Higgins, 2001) are entirely reliant on the ILO for primary source data, as are many international governmental organisations (IGOs), including the World Bank (2006). Recent estimates of the extent of this global social problem indicate that over the year to 2009, the number of unemployed young people increased by an unprecedented 4.5 million worldwide, when 81 million were recorded as being without work. By the end of 2010, this fell back to 75 million young people – one in eight of the world's 15–24 year olds (ILO, 2010). Significant as these figures are, they underestimate the scale of youth unemployment because they leave out of account all those in that age range who are not in employment, education or training, those who are working in the informal economy, or those who are ‘economically inactive’ but unrecorded (ILO, 2010).