Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Looking at NEET youth in NZ

The following graphs are from a report released last week by Statistics NZ.

NEET stands for Not in Employment, Education or Training. Youths are classified as 15-24 years of age.

First, the rate is dropping.




Second, NZ is just above the OECD average.



Third, and this is the most interesting graph to me, there is a sizeable chunk of female NEETs that are not in education, employment or training but involved in caregiving. This is due to NZ's high teenage birthrate and the associated availability of benefits. Go back up and note that countries with much lower rates of teenage birth and social assistance have much lower NEET rates.



This aspect of the NEET rate is rarely canvassed. The arguments tend to focus on the failure of schools, lack of employment and youth pay rates (all of which I accept can also be associated with teenage births).

Finally the report notes that Maori have the highest NEET rates, Asians the lowest. Again the correlation between female youth fertility rate and NEET rate is consistent. As a Counties Manakau (DHB) points out:

Asian women had the lowest fertility rates for teenage women aged 15-19 years in Counties Manukau between 1999 and 2003. The Asian fertility rate in Counties Manukau was higher than for all NZ Asians.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Young Asian women have a very high rate of abortion.

Anonymous said...

A very good post, Lindsay.
This country will only make real progress in cutting benefit numbers when there are no benefits available to those under 20, and when there is no incentive at all for a beneficiary to have more than two children.

Anonymous said...

Young Asian women have a very high rate of abortion.

And more importunely, if they are recent arrivals they are not eligible for benefits.

This country will only make real progress in cutting benefit numbers when there are no benefits available

Yes!! that's it.

when there is no incentive at all for a beneficiary

so's that! And the only way to remove those incentives, of course, is to remove the benefits

Age or fecundity have nothing to do with benefits. The problem with benefits is simple: they are paid to bludgers. Want to stop the bludging? The only way is to stop the benefits