Impact of minimum wage on youth unemployment a case study of East Africa

Abstract

The aim of this study to investigate the impact of minimum wage policies on employment among the youth population in the East African Community. It implemented a panel data analysis with a sample of three countries: Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania as the cross sections and uses data from the year 2000 to 2019. The independent variables regressed on the youth employed were: minimum wage, economic growth, investment growth, the country's human development index, inflation and the bank lending rate. The first model found a positive and significant effect from the human development index to the youth employed. The second model, which also included interactions between minimum wage and the other independent variables found positive significant effects from inflation and interactions with inflation and economic growth