Long-term consequences of being not in employment, education or training as a young adult. Stability and change in three Swedish birth cohorts

ABSTRACT

In this article we analyse the development of young adults not in education, employment or training (NEET) in three complete Swedish birth cohorts born in 1975, 1980 and 1985. We analyse the risk for future labour-market exclusion among NEETs, and how this risk varies between three birth cohorts who made the transition from school to work during periods characterised by different opportunity structures for young adults. Analyses using propensity score matching with repeated outcomes show that belonging to the NEET-group in early adulthood has an independent effect on the development of subsequent labour-market risk for both men and women. Moreover, this effect increases across the cohorts. The fact that the degree of labour-market attachment has clear and long-lasting implications indicates that the problems associated with being NEET cannot be reduced to a transient phase. Rather, it seems as though being NEET may be both a step on an already unfavourable life career and a triggering factor for social exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• NEET
• life course
• social exclusion
• propensity score matching
• Sweden

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Olof Bäckman is an associate professor of Sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. His research mainly concerns poverty, crime and social exclusion in a life-course perspective with a particular focus on the youth-to-adulthood transition. How structural factors such as social policy, educational policy and the economic cycle intervene in processes of cumulative disadvantage is an important theme in his research.

Anders Nilsson is professor at the Department of Criminology, Stockholm University. His research includes studies on social exclusion, the youth-to-adulthood transition and life-course criminology.

Notes

1 In 2007 Statistics Sweden changed its definition of unemployed in order to comply with the ILO-convention. Previously, students who were also job seekers were not coded as unemployed. Since 2007 they have been. However, in Figure 1 we have excluded students from the unemployed category in order to make the figures from before and after this shift comparable.

2 http://www.scb.se/uf0507-en/, accessed 17 March 2014.

3 Born 1975 = 107,000; born 1980 = 103,000; born 1985 = 106,000.

4 Since the 1990s, the number of persons in compulsory military service in Sweden has gradually declined, and it was finally abolished in 2010.

5 The age of criminal responsibility in Sweden is 15.

6 However, the results presented below are insensitive to matching with or without caliper.

7 We have employed the psmatch2 module in STATA to perform PSM (Leuven and Sianesi 2003).

8 In matching with common support, treated observations with propensity scores outside the range of propensity scores found among the untreated observations are excluded from the analysis.

9 Due to space limitations, Table A1 only reports the balance scores for the 1975 cohort. Balance sores for the other two cohorts are very similar to those of the oldest cohort and are available upon request from the authors.

10 This test has been implemented in Stata with the programme ‘sensatt’ (Nannicini 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte) [2011–0344].