Economic Anxiety, Employment Exclusion, and Future Expectations among Youth in Yemen

Abstract

This study examines how economic anxiety, employment exclusion and future expectations intersect among young people in Yemen. Drawing on a national survey of 990 youth respondents aged 16 to 30, the paper analyzes subjective economic status, family economic change, access to money, work participation, job structure, perceived macroeconomic threats, food shortage, poverty fears and personal and societal future expectations. The analysis is motivated by a central puzzle in development economics: how do young people imagine their economic futures when labour markets are weak, household resources are strained and national recovery remains uncertain? The findings reveal a layered vulnerability profile. While 54.8% of respondents describe the current family economic situation as very or rather good, this is notably lower than the 63.4% who described the family situation five years earlier as good. At the personal level, only 45.5% assess their economic situation positively, while 76.1% report having no money personally available. Work participation is sharply gendered: 69.8% of males report being part of the working population compared with only 27.2% of females. Economic anxiety is equally visible in risk perceptions: 60.2% worry very or fairly about becoming poor, 38.6% worry about being forced to leave the country for economic reasons, 47.2% view job losses as important or very important, and 83.1% view food shortage as important or very important. Future expectations show the emotional consequence of this material insecurity: 63.2% are pessimistic about their own future and personal life, and 42.8% are pessimistic about the future of society. By comparing these findings with youth labour-market evidence from Egypt and Syria, the paper contributes to the literature on youth economic vulnerability in fragile and structurally constrained Middle Eastern economies. It argues that youth economic anxiety in Yemen should be understood not simply as unemployment, but as a wider condition of constrained agency shaped by weak labour-market attachment, liquidity scarcity, household vulnerability and limited confidence in future mobility.