While all forms of unemployment are bad, youth unemployment is probably the most searing because of its corrosive effects throughout society.

Research by organisations such as the Prince’s Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have proved that “young adulthood” is a period of heightened vulnerability in a person’s life. Unemployment adds to the risk of drug abuse, criminality and, ultimately, incarceration.

Work by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, which has been studying the subject for nearly 50 years, established long ago that young people are more likely to commit crime when they are out of work.

That crime is often petty but it can turn into something more serious. The summer riots of 1981 in inner-city areas were strongly linked to high rates of joblessness among young people.

The Prince’s Trust reported last year that lack of job opportunities was a major factor in driving young people into gangs. It may also be driving some into extremist movements. The notorious preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed, the former leader of al-Muhajiroun, has said that unemployment helped his now-banned organisation to recruit members.

For school-leavers or university graduates, going straight on to the dole queue is damaging psychologically, because of the harm it does to self-esteem at a key age. It can also have a lasting effect on careers because a gap on a person’s CV, particularly straight after school or college, can raise awkward questions about their employability. Just ask people aged 48 to 50 who, as new graduates, struggled to find jobs between 1980 and 1982. Just ask the young Scots who found themselves out of work for more than a year after leaving school in the early Nineties and who, interviewed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation more than five years later, described how they were still struggling to find steady, long-term work.

Youth unemployment is not just a problem in Britain, though. According to official statistics, 20.4 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 in France were unemployed at the end of last year, compared with 16.5 per cent in Britain. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia it is almost 25 per cent.

If this all sounds very bleak, it is. There is only one consolation. Much of the great popular music of the past 35 years has been born in eras of unemployment and frustration.

Explore Economics

• Pre-Budget Report 2008

• Budget 2009

• World Economic Forum

• The Times MPC

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive