Italy 2nd-last for OECD youth jobless

(ANSA) - Rome, May 27 - The plight of Italy's jobless youth was again thrown into stark relief Wednesday by the latest figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based group of the world's 26 most advanced economies.
    The fresh figures prompted renewed criticism of Premier Matteo Renzi, who has made job creation, especially for young people, one of his key pledges and signature policies.
    Italy came second-last in the ranking on youth employment released on Wednesday by the OECD.
    The organization said the employment rate for Italians aged 15-29 dropped from 64.33% in 2007 to 52.79% in 2013, putting Italy second-bottom among OECD member States, above only Greece, which had a youth-employment rate of 48,49%.
    Italy is fourth-from-bottom in the employment ranking for the 30-54 age range, with a rate of 70.98% in 2013, down from 74.98% in 2007.
    Furthermore, some 26% of young people in Italy aged under 30 are 'NEETs' - neither employed nor registered in educational or training courses - the fourth highest figure in the OECD, according to the report on youth unemployment.
    At the start of the recession in 2008 the figure for Italy was 19.15%, so the increase has been almost 7%.
    There were more than 39 million young 'NEETs' in the whole of the OECD at the end of 2013, more than double compared to before the economic crisis that hit Europe.
    Among young Italian NEETs, some 40% left school without obtaining secondary school diplomas, 49.87% stopped education after the diploma and 10.13% have a university degree.
    There are more NEETs in Italy among young women (27.99%) than among men (24.26%).
    Reacting to the new jobless data, trade unionists and opposition politicians lambasted the alleged lack of success of Premier Matteo Renzi's job-creation policies.
    Susanna Camusso, secretary general of the CGIL trade union federation, said "these are data that confirm something that sadly is well-known - our country has lost a quarter of its productive activity, generating a stock of long term unemployment, with youth jobless very high, to which no legislation on the labour market succeeds in responding if one does not work on investments, the creation of work and the pension system".
    Maurizo Sacconi, conservative chair of the Labour committee in the Senate, for his part blamed falling educational standards in schools for the figures.
    "Poor knowledge of mathematics among adults and young people alike is the principal paradigm of this failure," he claimed.
    "The same can be said about the de-legitimisation of manual work".
    "Hence the need really to reform schools through hiring linked to that shortage of good maths teachers and for apprentices to have the same dignity as others in the education system".