Enhancing youth opportunities in employment: determinants and policy implications

Project description:

The aim of this project is to prepare a paper, whose aim is threefold:

1. A new approach of measuring the actual labor market status among young people. It will rest on elements of the definition of unemployment and NEET. By using unique panel data for Poland the paper will quantify the fraction of young unemployed that are registered in the Labor Office and actively seeking employment, those that are only registered as unemployed, but remaining inactive in the search of work, those that are not registered as unemployed, but are actively looking for a job and those that stay in NEET. Such a categorization gives an enriched insight into the real incidence of the problem of youth unemployment.
2. Use of this categorization, the paper would explore more in depth how the labor status of young people is to be interpreted within the context of his/her family background, cultural heritage, values, and economic barriers he/she faces to gain employment. The present study appears to be unique in terms of the use of such a rich set of information on individual’s starting conditions, as majority of studies concentrated their efforts on identifying intergenerational correlations between educational achievements only.
3. Identification of the extent to which educational programs offered by public institutions (financed from national and/or ELF sources) enhance chances and promote effective opportunities to reach economic independence in each of the group of young workers. The pronounced differences among young people may imply that programs should be more addressed to selected groups of young people in order to be more effective in improving youth employability and vocational skills.

General objective of the project:

The analysis will be based on the interdisciplinary Polish panel data called “Social Diagnosis”. The database in based on panel research, with the first sample being taken in 2000. The study was repeated every two years until 2011. The database takes into account all the significant aspects of the life on individual households and their members: the economic (like income, wealth), social (education, stress, well-being, lifestyle, pathologies), cultural and many others. Rich set of information included gives not only the multidisciplinary dimension of my study, but it also permits to take the life-course perspective.