A classification of School-to-work Transition Regimes

This note aims to provide a frame of mind to think of the determinants of the youth unemployment problem across countries and a criterion to classify EU countries. The key factor to explain youth unemployment is what we call the youth experience gap, namely the gap of work experience of young people as compared to their adult colleagues, even in a period of ever increasing education attainment. To help young people fill in the gap and ease the school-to-work transition, every EU country provides its own mix of policy instruments, including different degrees and types of labour market flexibility, of educational and training systems, of passive income support schemes and fiscal incentives. Five different country groups are detected whose outcomes in terms of youth unemployment are dramatically different: a) the North-European; b) the Continental European; c) the Anglo-Saxon; d) the South-European; e) the New Member States. The Lisbon strategy and the European Youth Guarantee provide guidelines in line with the theoretical framework discussed here, but they are costly and hard to implement.