Youth - English Version

It began on January  for the duration of 15 months.
The main aim of the research project is to get a comprehensive overview of current practices of labour market integration of young people and to identify good practices to improve young people’s pathways to work in the future. The project will provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis in the 27 European countries, since 2000. It will ask which kinds of youth employment structure changes have interested these 27 European countries in these last years.
According to current policy debates on European Employment Strategy, the project will focus on the key pillar “current practices and future needs for the labour market integration of young people”, implementing an integrated analysis of the employment policies for young people  in Europe.
This project intends to present the possible scenarios of the 27 EU countries, taking into account economic and demographic trends, labour market framework and the divergence between employment protection and social security protection. The project will take into account the socio-demographic changes that affect young people’s integration. These changes concern an ageing society, the need for solidarity between generations, and the socio-economic impact on the new generations that have difficulties leaving their family of origin. Low access to employment, job instability, expensive housing and lack of incentives (family benefits, parental leaves, child care, equal pay) negatively affect the rate of fertility.
The rate of employment of young people is low and the rate of unemployment is high. Young people are at particular risk of poverty and are sometimes victims of discrimination. The skills acquired by formal learning (education) are not always in line with the requirements of knowledge society. The education system has to meet the challenge to raise the level of education of all people and to improve the transitions from school to work. All social partners (private and public) have to contribute to promote social inclusion of young people.
The aim of this project is to investigate the dimensions of young people’s employment and job quality for these workers in order to identify weak and strong elements in the current practices for the labour market integration of young people. In this context, increasing productivity, increasing lifelong learning and labour market participation, in particular by creating a labour market characterized by a higher occupational mobility, are considered important practices.
This project draws attention to ensuring good comparative analysis through the exploitation of available datasets resources according to flexicurity policy.  

 

Activity

In particular, the project will:

• comparatively and critically review major studies and existing surveys on quality of jobs, employment and labour policies concerning young people in EU member states in terms of finding useful empirical and methodological indicators  and propose a model of flexicurity for young people
  Working paper
  Interim report
  Final report (more info, Ue website)

• identify good practices to improve young people’s pathways to work in the future in selected counties and formulate recommendations for promoting  employment and social inclusion of young people.