2016 Global Youth Development Index: Results and Analysis By analysing the key findings from the 2016 Global YDI, this chapter summarises the state of youth development in 183 countries, including 49 of the 53 Commonwealth countries, in 2015, and tracks trends for the five-year period since 2010. The YDI highlights the progress countries have made in improving the prospects and outcomes for their young citizens, and identifies potential areas for policy focus and investment by governments and others in the years ahead. However, the YDI scores and rankings must be considered within a wider context. Nearly 87 per cent of the 1.8 billion young people in the world live in countries that are classified as less developed – in Africa, Asia (excluding Japan), Latin America and the Caribbean, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Just over one-half of the world’s young people can be found in the neighbouring regions of Asia-Pacific (29 per cent) and South Asia (26 per cent), home to the two most populous countries in the world, China and India. Sub-Saharan Africa has a youth population of 265 million – 15 per cent of the world’s young people – making it the third most populous region of young people in the world. Central America and the Caribbean, Russia and Eurasia, North America and South America, respectively, have the lowest number of young people. 1 In nearly all developing countries, young people currently make up approximately one-quarter of the total population. In some countries, especially in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, young people constitute almost one-third of the total population. This demographic trend where the proportion of young people in the population is significantly large compared with other age groups is generally referred to as a ‘youth bulge’ by policymakers and researchers. This phenomenon reflects a stage of development where countries have been successful in reducing infant mortality even as fertility rates are still relatively high. In this report, when more than 20 per cent of a country’s total population are young people aged 15–29, the country is deemed to have a youth bulge. By this definition, nearly 85 per cent of the countries included in the YDI have a youth bulge. A youth bulge represents both an opportunity and a risk. A youth bulge implies falling dependency ratios and rising proportion of workers and savers in a country’s population. If young people form a large share of the population, countries have the incentive to allocate more resources in sectors that are critical to economic and social development such as education, health and infrastructure. That, in turn, can result in exponential socio-economic gains for individual countries and the world at large. A failure to capitalise on this ‘demographic dividend’, however, could bring untold misery to families, communities and entire countries as the youth cohort instead becomes disenfranchised and disillusioned. Many countries have limited time in which they can hope to make the most of the youth bulge. Currently, the share of young people in the world’s population is falling and that of older people is steadily increasing owing to declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy. This ageing of the population is at its fastest in developing countries, where young people currently make up nearly one-quarter of the population. According to UN population projections, the proportion of young people in the global population is likely to fall below 20 per cent by 2075, though the absolute number of young people will increase to 2 billion by 2060 and remain around that figure till the end of the 21st century.2 In contrast, the share of people aged 60 and older, who currently account for 12 per cent of the global population, is expected to rise to almost 22 per cent by 2050.3 The two population pyramids in Figure 2.1 show the projected change in global age structures between 2015 and 2100. The second pyramid is far wider at the top, showing the transition from having large cohorts of children and young people through to larger proportions of aged populations. This ageing of the population can potentially have many undesirable consequences such as workforce shortages, slowdown in economic growth, overstretching of pension and healthcare systems, and the dissipation of demographic dividends.4 2.1  Youth development: global trends In aggregate, youth development is improving on a global level, although the rate of progress is very slow. The Global YDI score improved by 3 per cent between 2010 and 2015, though more progress has been achieved in some domains than others, and not all young people have benefited in equal measure. Of the 183 countries considered in the index, 142 recorded improvements in their YDI scores over the last five years, with the largest gains being in Kenya, South Africa, Niger, Togo and Malawi, in that order, all Sub-Saharan African countries. There was a fall in YDI scores in 40 countries, with the deterioration being greatest in Pakistan, Angola, Haiti, Algeria and Chad. \ 29