Youth Employment in Nepal by Dhushyanth Raju, Jasmine Rajbhandary

Promoting the smooth integration of workers into the labor market and ensuring their early success has increasingly emerged as an important economic and social development goal around the globe. The Nepal government sees addressing the social and economic challenges of youth, and leveraging their social and economic prospects, as critical for the country’s economic growth and development.

There has been limited systematic, policy-oriented empirical research conducted on labor and livelihoods in Nepal. Dedicated examinations of Nepalese youth labor are rarer still.

Youth Employment in Nepal aims to improve understanding of the labor conditions, behaviors, and outcomes of Nepalese youth, which it examines in relation to both Nepal’s domestic labor market and labor migration by Nepalese youth to India and other countries. Such migration includes the temporary “foreign employment” of Nepalese workers under bilateral labor agreements between Nepal and destination countries. The book seeks to present insights and implications for research and public policy, with the goal of improving the labor market prospects of Nepalese youth.

The findings in the book point to three directions for orienting public policies and programs. First is raising rural labor productivity, urban labor demand, and urban worker–job matching efficiency. Second is supporting the labor market integration of rural youth migrating to urban parts of Nepal and of youth labor migrants returning from India and other countries. Third is improving the orientation and efficacy of labor skill training.