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• Author: Hyun-Sung Khang
• Position: a Senior Editor on the staff of Finance & Development.

Vanessa Tuduri was a 20-year-old student when the global financial crisis hit and her mother, who was helping pay for her studies, told her she would have to look elsewhere for financial support. Tuduri dropped out of university and joined the swelling ranks of young Spaniards looking for a job.Â

“We had dreams to grasp for, we wanted to eat the world up, we thought we would have everything, and then we were punched in the face by the crisis,” she says.Â

At its peak in mid-2013, youth unemployment in Spain exceeded 56 percent, according to the European Commission. Although the country’s economy has recently experienced an uptick, youth unemployment has a long tail, and its effects will be felt for decades—not only by the individuals, but also by the societies in which they live.Â

The scale may be exceptional in Spain, but the phenomenon of high youth unemployment is found in every region, from the serried ranks of the young jobless in the resource-rich Middle East, through the less mobile, less skilled youth in rural sub-Saharan Africa, to the overqualified, underemployed young in low-end service jobs in crisis-hit Europe.Â

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), in 2014 more than 73 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 were searching for work—14 percent of the age group, globally, from a low of 12.4 percent in 2007. The figure of over 70 million does not include groups such as discouraged workers, who have given up the job hunt—some estimate the true number to be up to three times higher.Â

Why worry?

Unemployment can be destructive to anyone’s sense of identity and morale, but its effect on young people can be more pronounced, more pernicious, and more enduring.Â

“For young people starting out in the labor market for the first time, you would ideally want people to go from education straight into a job. The trouble with youth unemployment is that the young tend to be at the margins of hiring and firing,” says John Wadsworth, of the London School of Economics. When a firm decides to expand its workforce, it typically hires young recruits, but when it shrinks its workforce, it tends to fire them first.Â

As well as being at the sharp end of an economic slump, the young who enter the job market during a downturn can suffer effects that endure for decades. Research on young people who experienced long-term unemployment in the recession of the 1980s suggests that even now, in their 40s or 50s, they are more likely to be unemployed and—of those who have jobs—tend to be lower paid than their counterparts who didn’t suffer an extended bout of joblessness.Â

“That means that when they retire, their pensions are going to be lower. It’s an effect that affects the whole of their life,” says Richard Exell, of the Trades Union Congress in London.Â

Long-term prospects for the young can also be blighted when they must accept jobs for which they are overqualified. Henry Rivera Angulo, 20—who is originally from Ecuador but...