S.KOREA - For 28-year-old jobseeker Kwon hee-kyu, landing a job at a Korean conglomerate seems like a distant goal. After finishing the two-year-contract work at a defense company in lieu of serving military duties, Kwon recently applied to Samsung, SK, Doosan, Daewoo Engineering and GS.

"I'm not sure whether I can get a job soon because there seem to be too many competitors in the job market," Kwon told The Korea Herald. He graduated from a university in Los Angeles in 2005 and worked for a U.S. company for one year until 2006.

"There are many U.S. masters degree holders who came to Korea to get a job, after failing to get into a U.S. company due to the slumping U.S. economy," he said.

Kwon is one of many Korean youths who are suffering the worst job market in 19 years, which resulted from the economic downturn in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008.

According to data by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and the National Statistical Office, the number of employees in their 20s and 30s slid 2.8 percent to 9.52 million in August from a year earlier.

The figure is the lowest level since 9.44 million was marked in April, 1990.

In September last year when the U.S. giant investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, the number of the employed in their 20s and 30s marked 9.8 million.

As the credit crunch forced companies to go ahead with a restructuring and small business owners had to shut down their business, the number of young employees continued to drop from 9.7 million in December to 9.6 million in January and further down to 9.5 million in February.

The youth unemployment rate recorded much higher at 8.1 percent in August, whereas the total unemployment rate remained relatively low at 3.7 percent.

The government has been striving hard to alleviate the youth unemployment problem by supporting a half wage up to 800,000 won for every intern of small- and medium-sized companies for six months this year.

The government is likely to continue the support through next year, instead of scrapping it at the end of the year, because thousands more intern workers at public firms, banks and other companies are expected to hit the job market, Finance Ministry officials said.

However, observers raised concerns that the level of youth employment may fall to 9.2 million unless the private sector's conglomerates raise recruitment.

Experts said the cost of youth unemployment means depletion of human capital, which is an essential part of economic growth.

Sohn Min-joong, economist at the Samsung Economic Research Institute, noted people in their 20s and 30s are more vulnerable to economic downturns in general.

According to his calculation, correlation coefficients between employment in people's 20s and 30s and GDP growth were 0.85 and 0.84, much higher than that of people in their 40s with 0.77, and that of those in their 50s with 0.36, between 1995 and the first quarter of 2009.

"If we assume that 10 percent of the 170,000 people, aged between 25 and 29 who lost jobs in 2008, fail to land a job for a year, the economic losses would amount to 5.3 trillion won," Sohn said.

"What's more serious is that the pace of job losses of youths is faster than the decline of youth population."