Band 8.5 — Bar Chart: Youth and Overall Unemployment in Five Countries

The bar chart compares unemployment among 15–24-year-olds with the overall jobless rate across five countries in 2024.

Overall, youth unemployment surpassed the general rate in every country, often by a factor of two or more, and both measures were dramatically higher in the southern European nations than in Germany or Japan.

Spain recorded the poorest performance on both counts: more than a quarter of its young people, at 28%, were out of work, compared with an overall rate of 12%. Italy exhibited a comparable pattern, with youth unemployment reaching 22% against a general figure of 9%, while in France the two rates stood at 17% and 7% respectively.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Germany and Japan enjoyed strikingly low unemployment. Only 6% of young Germans and 4% of young Japanese were jobless—figures which fell below the overall rates of all three southern countries—and their general rates, at 3% and 2.5%, were the lowest recorded. Notably, even in these robust labour markets the ratio of youth to overall unemployment remained close to two, suggesting that the disadvantage facing young workers is structural rather than local.