Youth Unemployment and Active Labor Market Policies in Europe

Marco Caliendo and Ricarda Schmidl ()
Additional contact information
Ricarda Schmidl: PwC Deutschland

No 9488, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Since the economic crisis in 2008, European youth unemployment rates have been persistently high at around 20% on average. The majority of European countries spends significant resources each year on active labor market programs (ALMP) with the aim of improving the integration prospects of struggling youths. Among the most common programs used are training courses, job search assistance and monitoring, subsidized employment, and public work programs. For policy makers, it is of upmost importance to know which of these programs work and which are able to achieve the intended goals – may it be the integration into the first labor market or further education. Based on a detailed assessment of the particularities of the youth labor market situation, we discuss the pros and cons of different ALMP types. We then provide a comprehensive survey of the recent evidence on the effectiveness of these ALMP for youth in Europe, highlighting factors that seem to promote or impede their effectiveness in practice. Overall, the findings with respect to employment outcomes are only partly promising. While job search assistance (with and without monitoring) results in overwhelmingly positive effects, we find more mixed effects for training and wage subsidies, whereas the effects for public work programs are clearly negative. The evidence on the impact of ALMP on furthering education participation as well as employment quality is scarce, requiring additional research and allowing only limited conclusions so far.

Keywords: active labor market policies; youth unemployment; training; evaluation; job search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J64 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of Labor Policy , 2016, 5 (1), 1-30

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Journal Article: Youth unemployment and active labor market policies in Europe (2016)
Journal Article: Youth unemployment and active labor market policies in Europe (2016)
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