The relevance of public employment services for the labour market integration of low-qualified young people – a cross-European perspective

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the Great Recession, youth labour market integration has become a central issue in both national as well as EU policy, e.g. in connection with the European Youth Guarantee. In this context, public employment services (PES) are considered central actors in promoting youth labour market integration. However, since international comparative analyses are scarce and the role of institutions and policies is thus rarely explicated, it is still an open empirical question whether and in which context PES can fulfil such a key role. Therefore, we analyse two questions based on the EU-LFS 2016 ad-hoc module: (i) How relevant is PES support to young people with different educational levels in finding a job? (ii) How do differences in the educational system and in labour market policies shape the relevance of PES support across Europe? This study illustrates that in countries with highly stratified, standardised and vocational-specific educational systems the relevance of PES is comparatively high in particular for the low-qualified. Thus, those countries have good reasons to strengthen PES to support the most disadvantaged and to combat labour market inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth unemployment
• public employment services
• job search
• crisis
• multilevel analysis
• active labour market policy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Martin Heidenreich, and Jenny Preunkert for suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sven Broschinski is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. His research interests comprise labour market inequalities, in particular the distribution of wages, and labour market institutions.

Marie-Luise Assmann is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Her research interests comprise active labour market policies, comparative welfare state analysis and youth labour market policies.

Notes

1 Austria has been selected because it has the highest support receipt rate apart from the outlier Finland.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG) [grant number HE 2174/12-2].