Nearly 40% of young Korean workers accept unemployment

According to VNA , KOSTAT said those classified as “Not inEducation , Employment or Training” (NEET) accounted for 36.7 percent of the 218,000 people of the same age who had been unemployed for three years or more as of May this year.

“Simply put, nearly four out of 10 Koreans aged 15 to 29 are NEETs,” KOSTAT explained.

In South Korea, people of working age are considered long-term unemployed if they have been out of work for the past three years.

According to experts, the NEET data shows the seriousness of the changing economic situation and the rapid decline of the national population.

NEETs are classified as people who are not available for work after being continuously unemployed, and therefore they are not even counted in the labor force, both active and inactive, in the job market.

Many of these long-term unemployed have college degrees, but the longer they remain unemployed after graduation, the more likely they are to give up looking for work. Their active job search rate is 53% within six months of graduation, but drops to 36.5% after three years of graduation.

Currently, the employment rate for people aged 15 and over is 63.2%. However, according to the expert, not including NEETs in the workforce could lead to doubts about the reliability of the data, related to the ability to make the most of the available workforce to cope with slowing growth and demographic changes.

Regarding this issue, KOSTAT also previously released some notable figures. Specifically, the figures released by KOSTAT on August 27 showed that out of 8.42 million people aged 15-29, 4.52 million had graduated from junior high school, high school or university. However, 1.26 million of those who had graduated were unemployed.

Figures from KOSTAT also show that about 52.8% of unemployed young people are university graduates and about 1%, or 12,000 people, have master's or doctoral degrees.

More than 36 percent of unemployed youth said they were studying to find a job, while 25.4 percent said they were not making any effort to find a job, the agency said.

On average, it takes 10.4 months for young people to find their first job after graduating. Meanwhile, about 15.3% of young people, equivalent to 591,000 people, said it took them more than 2 years to successfully apply for a job after graduating.

Minh Hoa (according to VNA, Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee )

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