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Youth Unemployment and China’s Economic Future

For decades, China’s growth has followed the pattern of advanced economies, with rising incomes and educational attainment, shrinking family size, and growing female labor-force participation. But across these and other dimensions, the economy now appears to be going backward.

CHICAGO – In May, China reported that youth unemployment (among those aged 16 to 24) had reached a record-breaking 20.8%, with the high-paying, high-skilled jobs that university graduates are trained for growing scarcer. Since mid-2021, hundreds of thousands of positions have been eliminated in the tech sector, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, stringent capital and antitrust regulations, and the government’s broader “tech crackdown.” And, as the rapidly changing policy environment adds to the uncertainty, cutbacks are also coming to other high-skilled sectors like finance.

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