Publication

What Have Regional Youth Support Programs Left Behind, and How Can Entry into a First Job Be Supported?

The 2026 youth policy implementation plans of Korea's 17 metropolitan cities and provinces list 1,563 programs worth 6.3532 trillion won, 975 of them run by local governments on their own. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety's Region-Led Youth Jobs program fell from 239.6 billion won in 2022 to zero in 2026 and never tracked whether participants stayed in the region afterward. Start-up programs report high start-up rates and sales growth, while employment retention after support ends is lower than average. Receiving the same program twice is blocked by guidelines, but receiving different programs one after another is decided program by program, and most local youth employment programs set no exclusion criteria for duplicate benefits. Entry into a first job has become harder: the time to a first wage job rose to 11.2 months in 2026, first-job entries per 1,000 young graduates fell while experienced entries rose, and institutions differ on how much of this is due to AI. The brief proposes measuring employment and residence after support ends, duplicate checks across similar program groups, new indicators for start-up support, paid apprenticeship-style first career jobs, and support for redesigning entry-level jobs with regular hiring statistics.