NEETs and Youth Unemployment: A Longitudinal Comparison Across European Countries

Young people’s place in the labor market has been a topic of interest to the European Union and national governments for many years. This study analyzes young people who are Not in Employment nor in Education or Training (NEET) and Youth Unemployment (YU) in the European Union member states, through data collected over a period of sixteen years, considering the influence of some macroeconomic factors through an hidden Markov model. This approach is based on maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters, and provides a dynamic classification of the countries into clusters representing different levels of the phenomena. We discover three clusters of countries, and we show that whereas Italy was the worst performing country in terms of both NEETs and YU, the Czech Republic was the best performing country in reducing NEETs, and Poland and Slovakia were the best performing in reducing YU.