Paper long abstract:

Annually 150 thousand youth enter the labor market of Tajikistan, but only 30-40 thousand of them are able to find a job in Tajikistan, another part goes abroad or goes to economically inactive group. The inability of economy of Tajikistan to provide all youth with work has led to mass labor migration. However, weak education and lack of experience make young migrants to work on hard works with bad working conditions, a low wage, violation of the rights, etc. Young migrants because of lack education loose their salaries, become a slave of situation and will be deported from the destination country.

The lack of suitable jobs, the big competition in labor market in the homeland creates additional difficulties. Failure in labor market in the homeland and/or abroad leads youth to alienation, frustration and some - to radicalization. But even if young people keep composure after long and unsuccessful job search, they leave the fighting for a job and fill up a number of economically inactive population. Each year the youth unemployment and inactiveness grow in Tajikistan, i.e. the NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) level is growing. According to the last researches the level of NEET-youth is 38-41% in Tajikistan which is the most high level in Post Soviet Union countries.

Before everybody thought that graduates of technical college have higher chance on job finding, but youth research in 2017 showed other picture.

Everything told above testify about big mismatch between employers, youth, and schools.

In our talk, we will discuss some of our key findings of the nationally representative retrospective life history surveys on 2,000 young men and women from Tajikistan.

We will show the profile of NEET youth and some findings on estimating the impect of individual factors and family background factors on NEETs using descriptive and regression analyses .