Drivers of Youth Labour Market Integration Across European Regions

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.