YOUTH EMPLOYMENT IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/Keywords:
youth employment, digital economy, labour market theory, digital skills, labour market segmentation, human capital, demand for labour, online outsourcing, institutional environment, task-based approach.Abstract
The paper examines the theoretical foundations of youth employment management under conditions of digital transformation. It argues that the established schools of labour-market thought - Marxian, neoclassical, Keynesian and institutional - each capture only a partial aspect of the mechanisms that generate youth employment once work becomes technologically mediated, and that segmentation and human-capital theories require re-specification. Drawing on the taxonomy of digital work and the typology of demand drivers developed by the World Bank’s Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) coalition, the paper proposes an integrated supply–demand framework in which youth employment outcomes are expressed as a function of four demand drivers, three levels of digital skills, the institutional environment and a set of inclusion filters. The framework offers a theoretical explanation for the empirically documented failure of supply-side-only youth employment programmes and reformulates the unit of policy analysis from the occupation to the task.
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