Which countries perform best and why?

This chapter examines countries' performance regarding youth unemployment. Although the labour market situation of young people has started to improve in a number of countries since the Great Recession of 2007–8, youth unemployment still remains very high across Europe. High youth unemployment rates reflect young people's difficulties in securing employment, or the inefficiency of the labour market. Germany and the Netherlands have established the most effective institutions to achieve a high integration of 15–19 year-olds in education and employment. Indeed, both Germany and the Netherlands are amongst the highest performing countries in the EU for making sure their young people are in employment. Austria and Denmark also achieve good youth labour market and employment outcomes. Meanwhile, countries like France and the UK try to facilitate school-to-work (STW) transitions by lowering labour costs through subsidies or low employment protection.

Migration and mobility

This chapter explores the changing and dynamic migrant reservoir in Europe, specifically looking at the labour market outcome of migrants with an emphasis on youth. Since the end of World War II, Europe has experienced large-scale migration both internally and from the outside of the EU. The descriptive analysis using aggregate country data suggests that even though migration from non-European countries is very substantial, the intra-European flows from Southern and Eastern Europe are non-negligible, with comparable emigration rates and differing trends and composition in the post-war period. The chapter then demonstrates that young migrants from both Eastern and Southern Europe are more likely to be overqualified than young native-born workers. To tackle issues of persisting native–migrant gaps in labour market performance, policies could be geared toward further integration and non-discriminatory treatment of foreign-born residents in the destination labour markets.

Family matters

This chapter studies how family legacies affect young people's strategies and decisions around finding work and moving into independent living. Where one comes from has always affected young people's job opportunities and paths out of school. These effects are becoming increasingly polarised both within and across European societies along a variety of dimensions that cannot simply be read off in terms of ethnicity, class, gender, the original nationality of one's parents, or even the society that young people from different backgrounds find themselves in. Understanding the long-term implications of these social divisions is central to knowing which kinds of policy interventions might be most effective in addressing current levels of youth unemployment. The chapter then looks at what happens to young people who leave home and/or set up their own families, and whether the recent recession has increased the risk of them returning to their parental home.

Skills and education mismatch

This chapter addresses three key aspects of young people's lives: the nature of human capital development in third-level institutions; transitions from education to work; and the relative exposure to employment mismatch and separation in employment. Young people are more likely to become unemployed but are also more likely to move from unemployment to employment. With respect to the individual characteristics that influenced labour market transitions, higher levels of schooling were a key factor affecting the likelihood of exiting unemployment to enter employment. The result suggests that young people's relative exposure to job loss is particularly high during recession. In terms of within-employment mismatch, the evidence indicates that while overeducation rates in Europe are converging upwards over time, the general pattern of overeducation is linked across many countries, suggesting that the phenomenon responds in a similar way to external shocks and, consequently, is likely to also react in similar ways to appropriate policy interventions.

What can we learn about policy innovation?

This chapter focuses on the institutional structures and processes that facilitate or hinder policy learning and innovation with respect to effective measures for school-to-work (STW) transitions. The salience of youth employment problems in many European countries has brought the need to develop effective measures of STW transitions to the top of the EU agenda. Indeed, it has generated EU initiatives for integrated policies addressing youth at risk and has accelerated mutual learning, policy transfer, and experimentation within and across countries. Experimentation with proactive youth employment measures is facilitated by a mode of policy governance that supports (regional/local) partnerships and networks of public services, professional bodies and education/training providers, employers, youth associations, and other stakeholders. As such, policy entrepreneurs play a significant role in promoting policy learning and transfer.

Flexible working and precariousness

This concluding chapter discusses work flexibility and security for young people. The balance of flexibility and security for labour market participants is a perennial challenge for policy-makers. Young people tend to accumulate negative flexibility outcomes in that they have more limited contractual security, and a greater risk of working on non-standard contracts and of losing their jobs more quickly than the comparable adult population. At the same time, young people also have less job and income security because of their lower seniority and more limited employment histories. Moreover, in most European countries, workers on non-standard contracts have more limited access to unemployment benefits than workers on standard employment contracts. These are all factors that can exacerbate the position of vulnerable labour market groups, which are often disproportionally engaged on such contracts — young people, women, and people with lower education levels. The crisis exacerbated the risks of these negative outcomes.

Young people’s attitudes and values

This chapter discusses the attitudes and aspirations of young people themselves. First, it considers whether being employed, being jobless, or having a temporary contract affect young people's attitudes to trust and trustworthiness Those who have managed to find good jobs, along with those who choose not to participate in the labour market or education, are more trusting than students, while the unemployed and above all those who find themselves in precarious employment are the least trusting of all. Young people — whether employed or not — also showed strong signs of solidarity with those who did not have jobs. The chapter then assesses young people's work values, arguing that generational differences in attitudes to work are a myth. It also looks at emerging policy lessons from research on youth attitudes and values.

Inspirational music and film

Here are some of the tunes that have accompanied us on this journey. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis ‘Growing Up’ (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mhtJduoCZ0 Adelehttp://adele.com ‘When we were young’ (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWKuo3gXMQ ‘Million Years Ago’ (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m0iZETAjTc Sherika Sherardwww.sherikasherard.com ‘Give me a job’ (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ1La7yCrqg Tinie Temper...

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of youth unemployment. In countries hit hardest by the Great Recession of 2008, young people have faced some of the largest obstacles in finding stable employment, or any kind of employment. Even in countries with a better performance record of getting young people into work, there were still significant pockets of youth — categorised as not in employment, education, or training (NEETs) — who struggled to make successful and sustainable transitions into employment. This was not altogether a new feature of European labour markets, but the Great Recession exacerbated problems, and in some case reversed previous successes. The chapter then presents five distinctive characteristics of the current phase of youth unemployment relating to the consequences of increased labour market flexibility, skills mismatch, new patterns of migration and family legacies, as well as an increasing role for EU policy.