As the Korean economy gradually recovers from the global financial crisis in late 2008, the number of domestic jobs increased over 386,000 in August, 2010 com-pared with same month last year. On the other hand, youth unemployment rate still remains high up to the 7.0 percent. Although government injected the budget for youth employment policy as follows: 473.2 billion won in 2008, 1.324 trillion won in 2009 and 939.7 billion won in 2010, condition of youth employment has not been improved much.

    The Korean government has implemented countermeasure several times to cope with youth unemployment since 2003, but it established new measures with-out comprehensive assessment of the past policy.

    Considering all these aspects, this report comprehensively evaluates perfor-mance of youth employment policy. We applied various performance indicators to the government programs to deduce overall employment-performance index and carried out comparative analysis among different program types. According to the results, some programs such as employment incentive subsidy, oversea employment service and university career center showed low performance in terms of the num-ber of employed youth compared to injected budget, job-ability improvement and employment contribution. We analyzed the causes of poor performance and sug-gested improvement alternatives for those programs in this report.

    In addition, after analyzing the system of youth employment policy, we have pointed out defects in overall adjusting function and performance management system. And we proposed direction of youth employment policy by reviewing trend of major countries where youth employment rate gets increased, and by analyzing importance among types of policy instrument.