New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- The new ILO report, released on August 11, The Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026: Back to the Future, shows that the global youth unemployment rate rose to 12.4 per cent in 2025, equivalent to 67 million unemployed people aged 15 to 24 years. At the same time, the share of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) increased slightly to 20 per cent, affecting more than 257 million people. Between 2023 and 2025, youth unemployment rates increased in eight of the world's 11 sub-regions, as slowing economic growth, weak job creation, geopolitical tensions and rapid technological change push countries towards a new youth jobs crisis. A recent report by NITI Aayog, the main public policy think tank of the Indian government, estimated that 87 million Indians aged 15 to 29 are 'NEET' - not in education, employment or training. The report further pointed out that only 8.25 per cent of persons who have graduated from college are employed in roles aligned with their qualifications.
In December 2025, UN economists cautioned that millions of jobs across Asia could be at risk as the AI industry booms at the expense of poorer nations still struggling to provide basic digital access and literacy. The Asia-Pacific region is home to more than 55 per cent of the world's population, putting it at the centre of the AI transition. According to UNDP, the region hosts more than half of global AI users and is rapidly expanding its innovation footprint; China alone holds nearly 70 per cent of global AI patents. The report said that although China, Singapore and South Korea have invested heavily in - and benefited massively from - AI, entry-level workers in many South Asian nations face "significant exposure" to changes already underway, including automation. "Limited infrastructure, skills, computing power, and governance capacity constrain the potential benefits of AI while amplifying risks, including job displacement and data exclusion," UNDP said. The economists cautioned that just as industrialisation in the 19th century "split the world into a wealthy few and the impoverished", the AI revolution could do the same. They urged governments to consider the ethics of AI before rolling it out further - and to ensure this is done in as inclusive a way as possible.
AI is clearly a major technological shock, and this technological shock is occurring in the context of a pre-existing environment of extreme wealth and political inequality. According to economist Paul Krugman, AI is emerging in an economy and society that are already strongly oligarchic, with enormous wealth and political influence in the hands of a handful of billionaires. Since 2024, the techno-financial elites of the USA have begun to be more assertive in trying to legitimise their extreme wealth and to lay claim to being the sources of techno-scientific and societal progress. In his January 2025 farewell address, US President Biden echoed Eisenhower's warning about the 'military-industrial complex', stating: "Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights, the freedoms and the fair shot for everyone to get ahead."
New technologies have revolutionised the world economy over the last quarter-century. In 1992, Bill Gates became the first modern IT mogul to enter Forbes' top 10 billionaires. In Forbes' top 10 in 2025, seven made their fortunes from high-tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 amassed over $16trn, which is about 8 per cent of US GDP.
Since the Industrial Revolution, technological breakthroughs have inspired dystopian fears but have largely improved human wellbeing. But the current technological revolution is unusual in a particularly unsettling way. It comes at the hands of a small group of very powerful people who hold themselves and their preferences in very high regard. However troubling their views of the future may be, nobody seems willing to stand in their way.
Artificial Intelligence promises extraordinary productivity gains. But it is also creating a growing challenge for governments to tax economies where machines increasingly generate value instead of people. For decades, modern tax systems have relied heavily on labour. Income taxes, payroll taxes and social contributions remain the backbone of public finances across most developed economies. VAT and sales taxes provide the second major pillar. Economists and policymakers across the globe are debating how to impose AI-era taxes to reduce the widening wealth gaps. Alongside broader tax reform, policymakers are exploring more targeted AI-related taxes. Proposals being debated include: robot taxes on businesses replacing workers with automation; token taxes based on AI processing usage; automation levies tied to labour displacement; and social taxes on excess AI profits. In South Korea, senior policymakers recently proposed redistributing part of the AI semiconductor boom through a form of "national dividend" funded by excess AI-related corporate tax revenues. Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said governments could start with a low levy on companies' AI-token use (an AI token is a basic unit of text that an artificial intelligence model reads and generates) and offer credits for retraining and retaining workers.
As technology oligarchs consolidate authority in ways that challenge traditional international relations, revealing a global order increasingly shaped by the ambitions and misconceptions of private actors, a new global governance system is urgently needed to save the world economy and environment from these new oligarchs.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a professor of Business Administration
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.