Economic and Labour Market Outsiderness among Young People in the EU

This paper analyses economic and labour market outsiderness for young people across different European countries and welfare regime models. We define ‘outsiders’ as those people who are either unemployed, in temporary contracts or have an income below 60% of the median. By using cross-sectional data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2006) we find: (1) a considerable variation in rates of youth outsiderness across EU member states. The persistence of youth outsiderness – measured observing the duration of the spell of outsiderness – is higher in Mediterranean countries than in Liberal, Continental and Scandinavian countries; (2) that the depth of youth outsiderness is influenced by the different types of skills possessed by young people. However, the strength of the effect varies across different welfare regimes.