Drivers of youth labour market integration across european regions

Abstract

Territorial disparities and youth labour markets have been often considered as separated themes, due to challenges indata availability. Comparative regional or sub-regional research on youth labour market integration have been therefore scarse. In this article, we address this gap by presenting a composite measure of Youth Labour Market Integration (YLMI) that covers a wide range of indicators and shedslight on the EU territorial divide of young peoples ́opportunitiesat regional level. In order to build the YLMI index, we use benefit-of-the-doubt-weighting, a seminal methodology on composite indicators (CI) that combines sequence with conditional weights based on the range of each sub-indicator. To proof the usefulness of YLMI, we analyze the evolution of regional youth labour market integration in the EU before and after the economic crisis; andthe trends of homogenization or differentiation across EU territories. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent employment conditions, skills supply and technological resourcesexplain cross-regional variations in youth labour market integration.