Mexico's Blank Ledger: The Two Stories Buried Inside the 'Nini' Number

The report opened on the bottom of a table, where a single column had split into two. Same country, same year, same age bracket — but the numbers belong to two different worlds. In Mexico, roughly three in ten women aged 18 to 24 are not studying, not working and not in training. Among men of the same age, that figure is one in ten. Those two lines from the OECD's Panorama de la Educación 2026 are the centre of the whole story, and they matter far more than the four-percentage-point celebration sitting in the headline.

The notebook was blank, so the beat began with footsteps — back in Manchester, on the first match reports I ever filed. Since then one habit has stuck: before you write down a number, treat it as a heartbeat waiting for a source. Mexico's 'nini' figure is exactly that. What you see in the headline hides two further stories, and both of them are the real news.

'Nini' comes from the Spanish 'ni estudia ni trabaja' — neither studies nor works. The word has circulated in Latin American media and policy debate for roughly two decades. What the OECD report shows is this: in the early 2010s, 23 percent of Mexicans aged 18 to 24 were outside education, employment and training — NEET, in English. That figure now stands at 19 percent. A fall of four percentage points over a decade. Not a small number. But beside it sits another: the OECD member-country average is 13 percent. Mexico remains six percentage points above it.

On numbers stories I keep an old habit. During 38 days in Russia in 2026 I started a ledger — names, ages, hometowns, job titles of everyone I met at every match. It later became a 200-name call list. The reason is simple: the bigger the number, the more invisible the people inside it become. And a reporter's job is to sit exactly where that invisibility sets in.

Counting only the turnstiles tells you nothing about a crowd's pulse — 38 days in Russia taught me that. A crowd has a rhythm: fast on a festival day, almost stopped on a day of bad news. The same applies to a youth population. Knowing how many are outside tells you nothing about who they are, why they are outside, and whose ledger is failing to count them.

This is where the real signal sits: the gender gap. In OECD data, Mexico's gap is the widest among member countries, at roughly 30 percent of young women and 10 percent of young men. Analysts working inside Mexico sharpen the picture. Mariana Belló, a specialist at Oxfam México, says that eight out of every ten people in the country who neither study nor work are women. That gap is not a family failure; it is an accounting failure about labour that is counted and labour that is not.

Unpaid domestic work, childcare, care for elderly or sick relatives — a long-recognised problem in Latin American labour economics. A young woman working from morning to night inside her home appears in the statistical column as 'inactive'. She is working, every day, without wages. That is the first gap in the number.

The second gap lives inside the definition. Carla Pederzini, a specialist at Universidad Iberoamericana, argues that the 'nini' label is so broad that it conceals distinct realities. One person has left school and is hunting for work; another is doing family care; another is ill; another is stuck for lack of training — all arrive under one label. The consequence is that the blame lands entirely on the young, not on the state or the labour market. Pederzini's prescription is plain: without care infrastructure — reliable childcare, provision for the elderly — the number will not fall.

The first story, then, is a story about measurement. Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If lowering the NEET rate becomes the only yardstick of success, the easiest route is to narrow the definition, or find a way to log people as working. If unpaid care work is not counted, the number will fall while real lives do not change.

A brief caution is required here. Belló's 'eight in ten women' and the OECD's '30 percent versus 10 percent' nearly agree — but not exactly. The difference may come from a different age bracket, a different definition or a different reference year. Before using either figure, cross-check the original OECD tables. This is not an accusation of error; it is a question of data provenance.

The second story is about long-term scarring. A young person who spends several years outside education, training and formal work between 18 and 24 finds the door into the labour market narrowing later — skill gaps, thin networks, and a long queue of informal work. Informality is widespread in Mexico's labour market, so many of these young people will eventually earn a living, but from outside social protection, pensions and training. Today's NEET rate is a draft of tomorrow's unprotected working life.

Outside readings usually get it wrong in two directions. The first: 'Mexico improved by four points, so it is working.' But the OECD itself notes that the decline is not exclusive to Mexico; many countries recorded the same fall over the same period. This is not a certificate of success for any single national policy — it is a regional or global trend. The number is coming down, but the distance from the average holds, and the gender gap is almost unchanged.

The second: 'nini means a culture of idleness.' That label has carried a stigma for nearly two decades, converting a structural failure into a personal one. Yet much of that 30 percent of young women are working at home, for no money and no recognition. Recast the accounting — call housework work — and Mexico's female NEET rate falls substantially. That is the report's biggest claim, and the least discussed.

So what should we watch? Three signals. One: how fast Mexico's 19 percent travels towards the OECD's 13 percent — without acceleration, this 'improvement' will flatten into a plateau. Two: whether the gender gap narrows, which would indicate real investment in care infrastructure rather than announcements. Three: whether the OECD or the ILO ever adopt a care-inclusive NEET definition; if they do, the headline numbers will change overnight. Until then the ledger stays half-written — and the young women whose names appear nowhere stay outside the book.