Bloomberg contributor Mike Dorning analyzes historic data and today’s economic climate, as it pertains to the career prospects for young people around the world.

His conclusion: The specter of the “Great Recession” will continue to haunt this generation for quite some time to come.

The worst global economic slump since the Great Depression is ending and things are looking up. But for some, the recession’s toll will last for decades. Chief among them are the young adults who had the bad luck to come of age in hard times — and are on track to be this downturn’s Lost Generation. History shows they’re unlikely to fully recover from the chances they’ve missed: career-launching first jobs, early promotions, quick raises, strategic leaps from one employer to another.

Those who graduated from college into the teeth of the 1981-82 U.S. recession languished behind their peers long after the economy rebounded, with lower earnings and less prestigious jobs even in middle age. Lost generations span the globe from Europe, where the longest-ever slump left almost a quarter of young people out of work, to the Middle East, where the prospects of the young remain blighted even after Arab Spring uprisings fueled by their frustration.

…No one ever thought recessions were a great time to find a first job. But recent research shows that the damage to career trajectory is surprisingly long lasting. Even 17 years later, members of classes that completed college in the U.S. during the 1981-82 recession earned an average of 10 percent less than colleagues who got their starts in boom times, and fewer of them held professional or prestigious jobs. By then, the cumulative cost of a poorly timed graduation already had exceeded $100,000 on average.

The impact on earnings of Stanford Business School graduates was found to persist at least 20 years. Following 20 graduating classes of Canadian college students across two recessions showed that the biggest contributor to the lag was initial jobs that offered poor positioning on career and salary ladders. Lower-skill college graduates have a particularly hard time making up lost ground, even when the economy booms. Another study of Japanese workers also found persistent effects on those who start work during a recession.

…Europe’s leaders have called youth unemployment a catastrophe for the continent. France and Germany unveiled a proposal last year to put young people to work by spurring business lending that they compared to the U.S.’s New Deal of the 1930s. The plan was criticized as a token effort with little new money behind it, although Germany’s call for others to adopt its successful apprenticeship system generated wide interest, if little action.

In the U.S. as well as Europe, calls for increased spending on jobs programs have been blocked by opposition to deficits by conservatives who argued that today’s young people would be the taxpayers stuck with the bill later….