Assessing policy strategies

By helenewPublications
apprentice working in a factory

The NEGOTIATE policy brief no. 7 focuses on assessing European and national policy strategies to combat early job insecurity and youth unemployment.

Coordination of European strategies to tackle early job insecurity and youth unemployment: Lessons from a comparative study (pdf), written by Irene Dingeldey and the German team

The situation of the young unemployed has become an increasing concern of national governments and the European Union (EU) after the financial crisis. Hence, in 2013 the Council launched the Recommendation on the Youth Guarantee (YG) and the Member States made a commitment to ensure that young people under 25 years “receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or traineeship within a period of four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education”.

NEGOTIATE is researching the implementation of this guarantee as a policy strategy because it is innovative due to its clear objective and provides dedicated financial resources for youth employment policy through the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI).

As many experts at European level understand the YG to be a structural reform, an important aim of NEGOTIATE’s research has been to assess the initiation of institutional reforms and the quality of coordination as an impact of the YG in the Member States.

Policy recommendations for the EU

At European level, significant advances have been made in promoting country-specific goal-setting, mutual learning and monitoring in relation to the YG. However, many measures and structural reforms that have been implemented in the Member States only develop their impact in the long-run.

It is essential to safeguard the progress already made and to keep on encouraging the Member States to make further progress in some areas, e.g. to complete the reforms already initiated, but also to deliver com-parable data to monitor labour market developments. Therefore, it is necessary that the YG continues to be supported in upcoming financing periods of the ESF.