Youth Unemployment and Guarantees in Europe: Learning from Local Labour Markets

In December 2012, the EU launched the Youth Employment Package, a raft of measures to prompt EU and member states action to improve youth employment prospects. This was followed in 2013 by the Youth Opportunities Initiative (YOI), a package of 6 billion euros to foster the implementation of Youth Guarantees. Youth Guarantees are defined by EU institutions as “measures to ensure that young people up to the age of 25 receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within four months of leaving school or becoming unemployed”. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the implementation of such Guarantees displays strong variations across EU member countries due to national priorities but also to local labour market factors and processes. The empirical results draw on semi-structured interviews conducted with national and local officials from the Public Employment Service in eight EU countries between July-December 2013.