Unemployment and participation in violence
How are unemployment and violence linked? Ideas about this link are driven by an OECD literature on crime, gangs and unemployment and by recent economic models of developing country ‘civil wars’. These ideas are commonly linked with an increasing interest in the age-structure of demography in developing countries, in particular the observation of a common ‘youth bulge’. There is a very widespread view that youth unemployment is a key cause of insurgency or civil war.