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Drivers of Youth Labour Market Integration Across European Regions

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Abstract

Territorial disparities and youth labour markets have been often considered as separated themes, due to challenges in data availability. Comparative regional or sub-regional research on youth labour market integration (YLMI) have been therefore scarce. In this article, we address this gap by presenting a composite measure of YLMI that covers a wide range of indicators and sheds light on the EU territorial divide of young peoples’ opportunities at regional level. In order to build the YLMI index, we use benefit-of-the-doubt-weighting, a seminal methodology on composite indicators (CI) that combines sequence with conditional weights based on the range of each sub-indicator. To proof the usefulness of YLMI, we analyze the evolution of regional YLMI in the EU before and after the economic crisis; and the trends of homogenization or differentiation across EU territories. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent employment conditions, skills supply and technological resources explain cross-regional variations in YLMI.

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Notes

  1. ISCED stands for International Standard Classification of Education. Levels 3–4 correspond to upper secondary education, while levels 5–8 correspond to university to Ph.D. education qualification.

  2. We picked the Netherlands because this country shows relative stable YLMIs over time and very low variation across its territories.

  3. We have also used in other specifications of the model, the share of scientist and engineers employed in the region, however when including this proxy, it was collinear with the other variable used to capture the innovation capacity of the region.

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Acknowledgements

Research for this paper has been carried out by the authors independently, but was inspired by research they carried out within the following projects: a) YOUNG ADULLLT funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693167 (see http://www.young-adulllt.eu/); b) COHSMO funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 727058. Rosario Scandurra is a Juan de la Cierva Grants Programme fellow (Ref. IJC2019-040056-I). The authors would like to thank Andrea Saltelli, Joan Guardia and Jorge Calero for early comments on the paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology and GEPS, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Rosario Scandurra

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Ruggero Cefalo & Yuri Kazepov

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  1. Rosario Scandurra
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Correspondence to Ruggero Cefalo.

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Scandurra, R., Cefalo, R. & Kazepov, Y. Drivers of Youth Labour Market Integration Across European Regions. Soc Indic Res 154, 835–856 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02549-8

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