Youth Employment in the Philippines

Youth unemployment and the difficulty of transiting from school to work has been a persistent and significant problem not just in the Philippines, but throughout the Southeast Asia and the Pacific. There are data limitations in the age groupings of population as sourced from the Labour Force Survey of the National Statistics Office, which only covers the 15 to 29 year old population. Moreover, as most local youth employment studies are simple, single year snapshots of the labour market, they have not been able to look at the changing trends of the youth with respect to their engagement in productive work.This paper seeks to respond to this gap by providing historical data, based on the national definition of the youth, as culled mainly from the public-use files of the LFS. The paper utilizes the more detailed questions in the LFS, the results of the youth profiling in the eight pilot areas of the Promoting Youth Employment in the Philippines project as well as the literature to provide some deeper insights on the labour market situation of young people region.