Abstract:

In 2013, due to high levels of youth unemployment, the European Union (EU) decided to launch a flagship policy to fight this situation. Thus, Youth Guarantee (YG) appeared as a response to this consequence of the economic crisis. After the line was established at levels higher of 25% of youth unemployment, regions in 20 Member States of the EU started to receive the aid of a budget that nowadays has allocated 9 billions €. Later in 2017, the EU also presented a document called Indicator Framework for Monitoring the Youth Guarantee, which clarifies the set of stats that the receiving Member States has to produce as public data which aims to facilitate the evaluation of the policy. Thus, we will separate the two main policy components, the measures focus on employment from those which aim to support vocational education and training, and analyse the latter. We will also evaluate the impact of YG only in regions of the countries that suffered the most and shared relevant geographic, social and cultural elements: Greece, Spain, Italy and Cyprus, all countries in the Mediterranean European Economic Area. We will also contrast the specific data with other economic and socio-demographic stats. It will help us to understand the effects of this policy in the whole picture. Our goal is to check the real impact of the policy and present its structural influence in the vocational education systems of the selected countries.

Keywords:

Youth Guarantee, Impact study, European Union, NEET, public policy evaluation.