A Chinese professor has made an unusual claim that the country’s youth unemployment rate might have hit a close 50% in March. This has brought back the debate about official statistics and the fixed attention on a weak labour market. The National Bureau of Statistics mentioned the month’s unemployment rate as 19.7% which includes people of the ages 16 to 24, which is less than half of what the professor had estimated. Zhang Dandan, associate professor of Economics at Peking University’s National School of Development, wrote in an online article in a respected financial magazine, Caixin, that if 16 million non-students who are ‘resting’ at home or rely on their parents were included, the rate of unemployment could go as high as 46.5%. Her article was originally published on Monday and has been removed.
The youth jobless official rate rose to a record of 21.3% in June which included people who are active job-hunters. The policymakers have been struggling to stabilise the economy since the Covid-19 pandemic, whose impact on manufacturing hubs of eastern China, Suzhou and Kunshan, was a part of Zhang’s research. The employment at Suzhou and Kunshan only recovered to two-thirds of pre-covid levels till March after Covid faded, she wrote. Majority of workers in the manufacturing sector are young hence they were affected more badly, she added.
She also said that the regulations in the tutoring, property and online platform sectors, introduced since 2021, have disproportionately hit young employees and the well-educated. Zhang’s statistical methodology was criticised as flawed by a user on Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like microblog, stating that economists generally do not count people who are not actively seeking employment for joblessness estimates, while several other social media users highlighted the difficulty in finding jobs in the country.
One Weibo post states the reason for numerous graduate students appearing for postgraduate or civil servant exams instead of looking for jobs is plainly because they cannot find jobs. Reuters made an attempt to reach Zhang’s work phone which went unanswered while the statistics bureau was requested for a comment and they did not revert immediately.