Two lead­ing econ­o­mists, Dr Ronald Ramkissoon and Dr Mar­lene Attzs, are ad­vis­ing that this coun­try’s youth un­em­ploy­ment rate must not be ig­nored.

Ramkissoon warned that fail­ure to put un­em­ployed youth in whole­some and pro­duc­tive work is not on­ly a se­ri­ous con­straint on eco­nom­ic growth but is high­ly dys­func­tion­al and al­lows gang lead­ers and oth­ers to fill the gap.

Attzs em­pha­sised that un­em­ployed youth is a con­cern, “giv­en we are wit­ness­ing, as a coun­try, high lev­els of youth in­volved in crime.”

Their com­ments came in wake of the re­cent Cen­tral Bank An­nu­al Eco­nom­ic Sur­vey 2023, which not­ed that de­spite de­clin­ing to 9.5 per cent in 2023 (from 12.0 per cent in 2022), the youth (peo­ple aged 15 to 24 years) un­em­ploy­ment rate re­mained dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high­er than the na­tion­al av­er­age.

The re­port added that youth un­em­ploy­ment “re­mains a sig­nif­i­cant so­cial chal­lenge, with sta­tis­tics re­veal­ing a high in­ci­dence of crim­i­nal of­fences per­pe­trat­ed by per­sons with­in this age group.”

For the youth to make a mean­ing­ful im­pact in well-pay­ing jobs, Ramkissoon rec­om­mend­ed that the em­pha­sis must be on train­ing in new tech­nolo­gies such as dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and on the ap­pli­ca­tion of these mod­ern tech­nolo­gies in en­tre­pre­neur­ial ven­tures.

Not­ing that some of this is al­ready tak­ing place with the in­volve­ment of the pri­vate sec­tor, mul­ti­lat­er­al agen­cies and the Min­istry of Youth and De­vel­op­ment as well as the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, Ramkissoon how­ev­er, said, “ar­guably there is need for greater col­lab­o­ra­tion and fo­cus if trans­for­ma­tion is to be much faster.”

The Cen­tral Bank al­so re­port­ed the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate (LF­PR) in­creased on­ly mar­gin­al­ly from 55 per cent to 55.6 per cent, which is low­er than the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can av­er­age.

For ex­am­ple, the av­er­age for the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca was 62.8 and for Ja­maica 64.6, Ramkissoon not­ed.

Fur­ther, he said the mea­sured un­em­ploy­ment rate at four per cent in 2023 from 4.9 per cent in 2022 was pos­i­tive, as it means that most peo­ple who looked for a job found one.

How­ev­er, he warned, “It must not be ig­nored, es­pe­cial­ly by pol­i­cy­mak­ers, that as this coun­try seeks to pro­mote faster eco­nom­ic growth, there are still vi­able op­por­tu­ni­ties to grasp.

“For ex­am­ple, it is good to know that growth can be en­hanced by in­creas­ing the LF­PR and more es­pe­cial­ly, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to the cat­e­go­ry of youth.”

Ramkissoon said the find­ings of a Cen­tral Bank Work­ing Pa­per (Roop­nar­ine et al, March 2023) were par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy. The pa­per ti­tled Ex­plor­ing the Nexus be­tween Labour Force Par­tic­i­pa­tion and Po­ten­tial Out­put: Ev­i­dence from Trinidad and To­ba­go found that “… im­proved labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion is a promi­nent fea­ture of im­proved po­ten­tial out­put.”

He added that study al­so found that youth and fe­male em­ploy­ment has an even greater im­pact on out­put.

Stat­ing that the labour force can be ex­pand­ed by mak­ing it eas­i­er for women and those with dis­abil­i­ties to be em­ployed and al­so by rais­ing the re­tire­ment age, Ramkissoon sug­gest­ed that im­mi­gra­tion is al­so a well-es­tab­lished method in de­vel­oped coun­tries for ex­pand­ing the labour force.

“In T&T, Venezue­lans pro­vide an ob­vi­ous and sig­nif­i­cant source of labour as ar­gued by some,” he added, fur­ther ad­vis­ing that a larg­er labour force can on­ly be ab­sorbed through the ex­pan­sion of ap­pro­pri­ate in­vest­ment.

Ramkissoon said the com­bi­na­tion of a larg­er labour force cou­pled with the ap­pro­pri­ate in­vest­ment would gen­er­ate faster eco­nom­ic and hope­ful­ly, in­clu­sive growth.

“In this, both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors have im­por­tant roles to play, the for­mer in pro­vid­ing the req­ui­site in­fra­struc­ture and over­all en­vi­ron­ment and the lat­ter, the en­tre­pre­neur­ship and cap­i­tal.

“The pub­lic sec­tor, in my view, ap­pears to be overex­tend­ing it­self such that notwith­stand­ing yeo­man ef­forts, it seems un­able to ful­ly ful­fil what might be con­sid­ered its ba­sic man­date such as na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty,” he said.

As it re­lates to the col­la­tion of da­ta, Attzs, a de­vel­op­men­tal econ­o­mist who ref­er­enced the COVID pan­dem­ic and its neg­a­tives ef­fects said, “I’m not sure we’ve col­lect­ed ad­e­quate da­ta on the num­ber of young peo­ple who might have left school or dropped out of school, and that could have led to what we call an ed­u­ca­tion deficit.

“An ed­u­ca­tion deficit is the dis­par­i­ty be­tween the knowl­edge and skills we ex­pect our young peo­ple to have af­ter hav­ing com­plet­ed school at the pri­ma­ry or the sec­ondary lev­els ... that gap be­tween what we ex­pect them to have gained, the knowl­edge and skills, and what they might have ac­tu­al­ly gained as a re­sult of them hav­ing left school pre­ma­ture­ly dur­ing the COVID years with­out com­plet­ing their school­ing,” she ex­plained.

Hence, Attzs said if they left pre­ma­ture­ly, these youths may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be equipped with the knowl­edge and skills to make them im­me­di­ate­ly em­ploy­able.

In terms of so­lu­tions to youth un­em­ploy­ment, Attzs said the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice has a suite of pro­grammes and to com­pli­ment these she sug­gest­ed there be the ap­pro­pri­ate da­ta on who are those youth at risk, their lev­els of ed­u­ca­tion, and what in­ter­ven­tions may be need­ed to sup­port them or bridge that gap and how they can cap­i­talise on the suite of ini­tia­tives and re­sources of­fered by the min­istry.

Attzs added she had a re­cent con­ver­sa­tion with the line min­is­ter for that min­istry, Fos­ter Cum­mings re­gard­ing the Youth Not in Em­ploy­ment, Ed­u­ca­tion or Train­ing (NEET) pro­gramme that is com­mon­place in oth­er coun­tries.

“He was al­ready fa­mil­iar with it ... Such a study could pro­vide ev­i­dence-based so­cioe­co­nom­ic pro­grammes of NEET youth in Trinidad and To­ba­go, youths who are not in ed­u­ca­tion, em­ploy­ment, or train­ing, and how they can be ab­sorbed in­to pro­grammes meant to sup­port them and ul­ti­mate­ly re­duce our youth un­em­ploy­ment rates,” Attzs said.

The Cen­tral Bank’s re­port al­so not­ed the fe­male un­em­ploy­ment rate de­clined to an av­er­age of 4.6 per cent in 2023 com­pared to 5.6 per cent in 2022, while the fe­male labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate de­clined to 47.1 per cent (47.6 per cent in 2022).

In analysing the da­ta, Attzs ex­plained this could sug­gest that few­er women were ei­ther em­ployed or ac­tive­ly seek­ing em­ploy­ment in 2023.

This, she added, could re­sult from a num­ber of rea­sons, such as a lack of suit­able job op­por­tu­ni­ties as well as some kind of mis­match be­tween the skills that they have and the avail­able jobs.

“And we know that there’s a con­ver­sa­tion around un­der­em­ploy­ment and cer­tain­ly grad­u­ates in the labour mar­ket,” she said, adding that an­oth­er rea­son could be that some per­sons may have opt­ed to not be part of the job search and in­stead opt to open on­line small scale or home based busi­ness­es, which may lead to un­der-re­port­ing of fe­male labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rates.

Then there is al­so the in­creased avail­abil­i­ty of mi­grant labour, which per­haps may al­so not be re­flect­ed in these num­bers as mi­grant labour can dis­place lo­cal fe­males who may have been not rep­re­sent­ed in terms of the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion, Attzs fur­ther ex­plained.