Youth unemployment and guarantees in recessionary times: Lessons from eight European countries

While youth unemployment has traditionally been of major concern for European policy makers, the Great Recession has led to a renewed and intensive focus on this vulnerable category of the population. In December 2012, the EU launched the Youth Employment Package, a raft of measures to prompt member state action to improve the situation of the EU’s young. This was followed in 2013 by the Youth Opportunities Initiative (YOI), a package of 6 billion euros to foster the implementation of Youth Guarantees. The objective of this paper is to subject the “Guarantee” to both theoretical and empirical scrutiny. It will start by framing it as a concept and as a policy instrument. It will be argued that youth guarantees cannot be understood without a discussion of other notions such as risk, insurance, responsibility and reciprocity, all of which have recently been recast within the context of welfare restructuring, affecting the institutional framework for welfare-to-work and school-to-work transitions. The paper will then posit that the ability of Member States to implement such Guarantees is not only extremely variable across the EU, but also strongly determined by multi-level governance mechanisms and local labour markets. Consequently, the EU’s youth strategy appears to be strongly constrained by national priorities and local labour market processes. The empirical results will draw on 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with officials from the Public Employment Service in eight European countries between July and October 2013.