China and India recorded the same percentage of young people who are seeking work without success. In Indonesia, the rate is 14%. Malaysia’s is 12.5%.   

Across these populous nations, that adds up to 30 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are looking for jobs but can’t find suitable ones. They account for just less than half the global total of 65 million jobless youth in that age range, according to ILO data. 

The figures are worse than in rich countries such as the U.S., Japan and Germany, where young people tend to get snapped up, though not as bad as slow-growing southern European countries such as Italy and Spain where around a quarter of young people are failing to find work. 

For Asian countries that don’t have China’s broad manufacturing base, the double-digit youth unemployment rates raise urgent questions about how to move up the development ladder—and the costs of failing to do so.  

Anger over dwindling prospects was a key driver of this month’s tumultuous events in Bangladesh, where large crowds of students forced Sheikh Hasina to relinquish power after more than 15 successive years as prime minister and flee the country. In India, whose economy grew at 8% in the year ended March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party lost its parliamentary majority in elections this year.

Though India’s youth unemployment has come down in recent years, it remains above the global average. Analysts cited poor work opportunities as a major factor in Modi’s setback.

China’s government last year stopped publishing a youth unemployment statistic for a time after it showed more than a fifth of young people weren’t able to find work—a record. Indonesia’s solid economic growth of 5% is coming in large part from an unprecedented expansion in mining and mineral processing, sectors that employ lots of heavy machines and not a lot of people.

In many countries, difficulty in finding decent work extends well into a job seeker’s 20s. Last year, 71% of employed 25- to 29-year-olds in South Asia had insecure work, meaning they were self-employed or in temporary jobs—not a significant fall from the 77% figure recorded two decades ago.

Globally, unemployment among young people tends to run higher than for the labor force as a whole. But across swaths of developing Asia hoping to follow China’s upward trajectory, the trend points to an overarching question: Is the ladder to prosperity broken? 

Take Bangladesh. The South Asian nation pulled itself out of poverty by becoming the clothing factory of the world, producing jeans, shirts and sweaters for major Western brands. Millions left the farm for factories.  

Then Bangladesh got stuck. It didn’t level up to more complex, higher-value production—say of electronics, heavy machinery or semiconductors—that lead to higher-skilled, better-paying jobs. That transition is how Japan, South Korea and China became breakout economic successes. The climb, however, has become far steeper.

Countries hoping to make it now must compete with hyper-efficient China. Developed economies such as the U.S. are vying to bring more production home. Automation is shifting the landscape. Even Bangladesh’s main growth engine—the production of clothes—is turning to machines over manpower. 

Garment exports have doubled over the past decade while overall employment in the sector has grown at a much slower rate.

Then there is the great labor mismatch. Each year, more people in Asia’s developing nations are pursuing higher education and getting college degrees. When they are done, they favor white-collar jobs in fields such as design, marketing, technology and finance. Those are jobs their countries don’t produce in abundance. 

India, for instance, has developed a well-known information technology industry, but that can only employ so many people, and artificial intelligence is coming for some of those jobs. More than 40% of the country’s college graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed, compared with 11% of those of the same age group who are literate but haven’t completed primary school, according to a 2023 report from Azim Premji University in Bengaluru that is based on official data.

“Now that you’re educated where your dad was not, your mother was not, you don’t want to get stuck in a job like your parents,” said Kunal Sen, director of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research in Finland. “That’s the problem that I think political leaders have not understood.” 

In Bangladesh, those with college degrees have an unemployment rate three times the overall figure, according to a 2022 government survey. The library at the University of Dhaka, one of the country’s premier educational institutions, is filled with unemployed alumni poring over books for their first, second or even third shots at cracking the civil service exam. Many live on allowances from their parents well into their late 20s.

Aktaruzzaman Firoz, 28, graduated with a master’s in sociology in 2021 but hasn’t been able to find work despite applying for 50 positions. He entered the race for a government job this year with 500 applicants competing for two spots, he said. He made it to the final round but lost out.

To scrape by, Firoz borrows money from his father, a low-level civil servant in their rural hometown who recently had open-heart surgery. He has put off ambitions to seek a life partner. “If I can’t take responsibility for my family, how can I go for marriage?” he said.

Many Bangladeshis have their hearts set on prestigious government work because the country’s underdeveloped private sector doesn’t provide many steady white-collar jobs. This year’s protests were sparked by a June court decision to reserve 30% of government appointments for families of Bangladeshi veterans of the country’s Liberation War.

A 26-year-old student leader of the protests, Asif Mahmud, is now a government minister overseeing the youth and labor ministries. “One of the main drivers of these protests was the growing job crisis,” he said. He aims to fix the problem by enabling schools and universities to work with industry to churn out employment-ready graduates, he said. 

“The total number of job opportunities is not enough for Bangladesh, in terms of its population,” said Mahmud.