Britain's 3.09 is high. It is not the outlier a table of nine countries makes it look

Small comparison sets flatter conclusions. This one flattered ours, so the correction comes first.

Against all 182 countries with 2025 figures, the median ratio is 2.34 and Britain's 3.09 puts it 33rd. Against the 63 high income countries it is 20th. Against the fifty high income countries with adult unemployment above 3 per cent, which is the cleanest comparison for reasons set out below, it is 13th.

Top quarter. Clearly above the middle. Not an outlier, and not the near-worst that a table of nine countries suggested.

Sweden is at 2.80, Slovenia 3.00, Belgium 3.01, Hungary 3.14, Czechia 3.26, Portugal 3.28, Croatia 3.29, the Slovak Republic 3.44, Poland 3.60, Romania 4.10. Several of these are countries Britain would not think to compare itself with on this. All of them treat their young people, relative to their adults, worse than Britain does.

Why the unfiltered table misleads. The highest ratios in the world belong to Kuwait at 6.90, Bahrain at 4.91 and Qatar at 4.30. Qatar's comes from a youth rate of 0.56 per cent divided by an adult rate of 0.13 per cent. When the denominator is that small, the ratio stops describing young people and starts describing arithmetic. Strip out the high income countries with adult unemployment below 3 per cent and the group median falls from 2.80 to 2.49, and the maximum from 6.90 to 4.27. Britain's own denominator, 4.7 per cent, is comfortably clear of that floor, so its figure is not an artefact. Several of the ones above it are.

The pattern nobody expects. The youth penalty rises with national income. Among low income countries the median is 1.61. Lower middle income, 1.97. Upper middle, 2.43. High income, 2.80.

The poorer the country, the less it distinguishes between its young and its adults. That is not because poor countries are kinder to their young. It is because in a labour market where almost everyone is scrambling, being young is not a distinct disadvantage. Youth unemployment becomes a separate problem in economies rich enough to have built a formal route into work, and then to let it close.

For a publication asking what happens when there is less work to go round, that is the finding to sit with. Shutting the young out is something developed labour markets do. Britain does more of it than most of its neighbours, and rather less than the table of nine implied.