YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT CHALLENGE

Policy Brief on Youth Entrepreneurship*

Entrepreneurial Activities in Europe

Youth unemployment is one of the principal social and economic challenges of this decade in Europe and around the world. Long spells of unemployment can have serious long-term effects for individuals, such as reduced earnings and social exclusion.

A striking feature of the recent crisis has been the diversity of labour market performances among EU countries. Remarkably, youth unemployment rates in Germany and Luxembourg declined slightly between 2008 and 2010. However, they increased in all other countries and quite dramatically in some. Countries that have been hit the hardest by the recession are among those with the highest youth unemployment rates – Greece, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia and Ireland.

There are some small gender diff erences to the patterns. The unemployment rate for young women, overall in the EU, was 1.6 percentage points lower than the rate for young men. There are only seven countries in the EU where the unemployment rate for men was lower than for young women: Czech Republic, Greece, France, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, and Portugal.

It might be expected that the economic crisis would impact young people much more than adults because of their higher propensity for temporary work and the drying up of opportunities to enter the labour market for their first job. In reality, the increase in youth unemployment was not much more than for adults.

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*excerpts from EC and OECD paper