INVESTIGATION OF THE LINKAGES CONNECTED TO CHRONIC LEVEL OF YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT: INEFFICIENCIES IN EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKETS (AND) INSTITUTIONS

Year 2017, Volume: 9 Issue: 1, 115 - 131, 01.02.2017

Murat Putun

Abstract

Unemployment today poses as one of the most pressing social and economic
reality globally; and has gained a new momentum with the emergence of
substantiated new version of youth unemployment. This new version of
unemployment has had a considerable impact on economic research in order to
adres the issues waiting immediate actions. Youth unemployment is not only an
important issue standing for young but also a macroeconomic phenomenon
largely related to overall unemployment level. Hence it represents a particular
importance for the policy makers whose actions needed to stabilise the economy.
This work is an attempt to study youth unemployment in Europe which is
increasingly reaching to unprecedented levels. It is an alarming fact is that youth
unemployment average ratio in European Union countries is more than the
double of overall unemployment rate and statistics have been increasingly
worrying particularly for those of Southern member of EU and Ireland. Even
though economic criss has aggravated the extent of youth unemployment, the
impacts of youth unemployment had long been felt before the outburst of the
recent economic crisis. While on the one hand it is possible to think of a positive
linkage between economic activity and youth unemployment, on the other hand
there is not enough empirical evidence to back up this underlined correlation.
The channels through which youth and adult people were being effected had
beeen profoundly differentiated and the difference between these two groups had
largely been widened unfavourably against the former. The fundamental cause of
youth unemployment in Europe lieas in the heart of structural factors in which
both differences and similarities are found. This work shows that policies,
strategies, reforms initiated by labour market institutions and other able bodies have not been synchronised in their excecution. The fact that EU is an Economic
and Monetary Union invokes the required level of labour mobility to rebalance
the employment level, but this mechanism has not performed well to absorb
unemployment in general and youth unemployment in particular.

Keywords

Youth Unemployment, European Union, Structural Reforms, Policy Makers in EU, Labour Markets, Economic Union, International Mobility of Labour, European Commission, Economic Efficiency