Chinese professor says youth jobless rate might have hit 46.5%

BEIJING: An unusually public claim by a Chinese professor that the country's youth unemployment rate might have hit close to 50 per cent in March has revived a debate about official statistics and focused attention on a weak labour market.

The National Bureau of Statistics said that the month's jobless rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 was 19.7 per cent, less than half of what Peking University professor Zhang Dandan estimated.

If 16 million non-students "lying flat" at home or relying on their parents were included, the rate could have been as high as 46.5 per cent, Zhang wrote in an online article in Caixin, a respected financial magazine.

Zhang is an associate professor of Economics at the university's National School of Development. Her article, originally published on Monday (Jul 17), has since been removed.

The official youth jobless rate, which only includes people actively seeking work, rose to a record 21.3 per cent in June after the world's second-biggest economy lost steam in the second quarter. Policymakers have struggled to put the economy on a more stable footing since the COVID-19 pandemic.