China’s youth unemployment rate is 14.7%, and President Xi Jinping is concerned. He has urged Chinese officials to create more jobs for the youths, in addition to jobs for migrant workers. The Wall Street Journal’s Singapore based editors report:
China’s president is urging officials to create more jobs for young people and migrant workers, in what could be a signal that employment policy may be in the pipeline ahead of a key political meeting in July.
Employment for young people including fresh graduates is a top priority, President Xi Jinping told members of China’s top decision-making body this week, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday. He also called for more efforts to be made to help migrant workers get jobs, Xinhua reported.
Xi’s remarks come as some of China’s major job-creation engines stall. A drawn-out property slump has slowed construction to a crawl, while rising trade tensions pose risks for the sprawling factory sector that churns out Chinese exports.
For the record-high nearly 12 million college graduates set to enter China’s job market this year, landing a job will likely be tough. Official data pegged the youth jobless rate at 14.7% in April, an improvement on the prior month, but economists say unemployment is still high.
There is some wariness about official tallies after China’s statistics bureau suspended the release of youth jobless data last year after the rate hit a record high of 21.3%. It later resumed publishing the series with a new methodology that excludes students, which some analysts say plays down the latitude of youth unemployment.
The problem isn’t that China doesn’t have jobs for the youth, economists say. The issue is structural imbalances in the job market.
Many factories struggle to find enough workers to keep production lines humming as the population ages, while low-paid service sectors such as housekeeping find it hard to attract employees. There is also a shortage of the better-paid, high-skilled jobs many young people want to land after years of studying.
In his remarks to the Politburo, Xi called on officials to study the reasons behind labor shortages in some unspecified sectors of the economy, Xinhua reported.
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