Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Avoiding The Quick Fix Approach To Solving Youth Unemployment

Sara Riso 13th April 2016

Sara Riso

Sara Riso

A key priority for EU policy makers is to combat high levels of youth unemployment. Supporting young people to start a new business is increasingly regarded as a way to achieve this goal. And yet the understanding of what drives the success and failure of youth entrepreneurship policies remains incomplete. In a rush to deliver ‘quick fixes’ to the problem of youth unemployment, governments are falling short of devising well-coordinated policy interventions firmly grounded in evidence that could, in the longer term, be more effective and save public money.

The most recent Eurofound report on start-up support for young people highlights the breadth and variety of publicly supported measures on youth entrepreneurship available in the EU. But it also points to the lack of robust policy impact evaluations and the many shortcomings of those evaluation practices deployed.

Questioning the rationale of youth entrepreneurship policies

The point of departure of many start-up support measures under the Youth Guarantee is that entrepreneurship is a viable solution to youth unemployment. The assumption is that all young people are potential entrepreneurs. But the reality is different: very few make it and become successful entrepreneurs. Those who fail can instead end up scarred by failure.

The other problem is that many start-up support schemes under the Youth Guarantee are often general activation measures for the unemployed as a whole. The risk is of subsuming the young within a much broader target group without addressing their specific needs, and instead diminishing the potential impact of the interventions.

The bumpy road from conception to evaluation of policy interventions

So where’s the rub? Where do policy makers get it wrong? It starts with the design of the interventions. First, the objectives of the interventions are rarely specified when programmes are being developed. Many start-up support measures specify higher-level aims, focused, for example, on increasing employability, but quantifiable and explicit targets are hardly ever set. This ends up compromising the entire evaluation process. In the absence of measurable targets, the evaluators have no other option than inferring and inputting them afterwards.

Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content.


We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Thank you!

Please check your inbox and click on the link in the confirmation email to complete your newsletter subscription.

.

Another problem is that many start-up interventions for young people tend to be discrete, small-scale, temporary measures with relatively limited financial resources. They are rarely embedded within larger policy frameworks or youth employment strategies. Such measures are often short-lived and their potential impact is reduced. This is certainly not a good basis on which to build any evaluative research.

These first observations point to another important shortcoming: policy evaluations are not planned rigorously enough from the outset. They are often an exercise disconnected from the policy delivery, instead of being an integrated part of it and adequately resourced.

From a policy maker’s perspective, the big concern is the limited funds for policy evaluations, especially in a context where public funding is increasingly rationed. This concern is particularly important considering that impact evaluations using more sophisticated methods (those controlling for differences between the participants and non-participants) make heavy demands on time, as well as on human and financial resources. But what holds back from conducting impact evaluations, even more than any budgetary considerations, is that these costly endeavours often point to little or no effect of the policy measures under scrutiny.

Evaluation is an iterative process that helps designing better policies

Then, if costly and sophisticated impact evaluations show little or no impact, why bother at all? Simpler monitoring-type evaluations, mainly relying on self-reported data of beneficiaries’ opinions and views or basic data on budget and uptake, are less costly and yield more positive results. These are still referred to as ‘evaluations’ in the policy jargon and they tend to be favoured over evaluations using more appropriate quantitative statistical methods.

This is evidenced by the very few youth entrepreneurship interventions that are the subject of robust impact evaluations compared to those that receive lighter forms of evaluation. A simpler evaluation of the UK’s Prince’s Trust Enterprise Programme (for disadvantaged youth) shows positive results and high satisfaction among participants. However, a previous evaluation adopting a more scientific approach pointed to very limited impact, especially in terms of employment probabilities.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

The point of committing to and investing in more robust impact evaluations is to link the results to the process of delivering the policy measure. If no or limited policy impact is shown, this is not the end of the exercise. The evaluation should lead to changes in the way the measure is implemented. In practice, impact evaluations rarely indicate whether and how the measure should be modified or whether it should be halted altogether.

Although the evaluation of the French CréaJeunes measure on enterprise training for young people found no policy impact, the programme continues to be run in the same format and is now part of the national Youth Guarantee. The results from this evaluation suggest that it may be wiser to revisit the specific design elements of the programme in order to improve its effectiveness and impact.

There is also evidence from a recent evaluation of the Swedish Junior Achievement Company Programme that offering hands-on opportunity to run a business at a fairly young age in a risk-free environment may be more effective. It helps young people to determine whether entrepreneurship is a suitable career path for them, without any fear of business failure.

If the results are not fed back into policy design and delivery, the risk is to perpetrate ineffective interventions that fail to address any youth problem and only waste public money.

Sara Riso

Sara Riso is a research officer in Eurofound, Dublin. She joined Eurofound in 2006 and she has been responsible for the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) since 2010. Sara has worked on several restructuring-related projects but also labour mobility. Before joining Eurofound, she worked as project manager for large European associations and networks.

Home ・ Politics ・ Avoiding The Quick Fix Approach To Solving Youth Unemployment

Most Popular Posts

schools,Sweden,Swedish,voucher,choice Sweden’s schools: Milton Friedman’s wet dreamLisa Pelling
world order,Russia,China,Europe,United States,US The coming world orderMarc Saxer
south working,remote work ‘South working’: the future of remote workAntonio Aloisi and Luisa Corazza
Russia,Putin,assets,oligarchs Seizing the assets of Russian oligarchsBranko Milanovic
Russians,support,war,Ukraine Why do Russians support the war against Ukraine?Svetlana Erpyleva

Most Recent Posts

Gazprom,Putin,Nordstream,Putin,Schröder How the public loses out when politicians cash inKatharina Pistor
defence,europe,spending Ukraine and Europe’s defence spendingValerio Alfonso Bruno and Adriano Cozzolino
North Atlantic Treaty Organization,NATO,Ukraine The Ukraine war and NATO’s renewed credibilityPaul Rogers
transnational list,European constituency,European elections,European public sphere A European constituency for a European public sphereDomènec Ruiz Devesa
hydrogen,gas,LNG,REPowerEU EU hydrogen targets—a neo-colonial resource grabPascoe Sabido and Chloé Mikolajczak

Other Social Europe Publications

The transatlantic relationship
Women and the coronavirus crisis
RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?
US election 2020
Corporate taxation in a globalised era

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

EU Care Atlas: a new interactive data map showing how care deficits affect the gender earnings gap in the EU

Browse through the EU Care Atlas, a new interactive data map to help uncover what the statistics are often hiding: how care deficits directly feed into the gender earnings gap.

While attention is often focused on the gender pay gap (13%), the EU Care Atlas brings to light the more worrisome and complex picture of women’s economic inequalities. The pay gap is just one of three main elements that explain the overall earnings gap, which is estimated at 36.7%. The EU Care Atlas illustrates the urgent need to look beyond the pay gap and understand the interplay between the overall earnings gap and care imbalances.


BROWSE THROUGH THE MAP

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Towards a new Minimum Wage Policy in Germany and Europe: WSI minimum wage report 2022

The past year has seen a much higher political profile for the issue of minimum wages, not only in Germany, which has seen fresh initiatives to tackle low pay, but also in those many other countries in Europe that have embarked on substantial and sustained increases in statutory minimum wages. One key benchmark in determining what should count as an adequate minimum wage is the threshold of 60 per cent of the median wage, a ratio that has also played a role in the European Commission's proposals for an EU-level policy on minimum wages. This year's WSI Minimum Wage Report highlights the feasibility of achieving minimum wages that meet this criterion, given the political will. And with an increase to 12 euro per hour planned for autumn 2022, Germany might now find itself promoted from laggard to minimum-wage trailblazer.


FREE DOWNLOAD

ETUI advertisement

Bilan social / Social policy in the EU: state of play 2021 and perspectives

The new edition of the Bilan social 2021, co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), reveals that while EU social policy-making took a blow in 2020, 2021 was guided by the re-emerging social aspirations of the European Commission and the launch of several important initiatives. Against the background of Covid-19, climate change and the debate on the future of Europe, the French presidency of the Council of the EU and the von der Leyen commission must now be closely scrutinised by EU citizens and social stakeholders.


AVAILABLE HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Living and working in Europe 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic continued to be a defining force in 2021, and Eurofound continued its work of examining and recording the many and diverse impacts across the EU. Living and working in Europe 2021 provides a snapshot of the changes to employment, work and living conditions in Europe. It also summarises the agency’s findings on issues such as gender equality in employment, wealth inequality and labour shortages. These will have a significant bearing on recovery from the pandemic, resilience in the face of the war in Ukraine and a successful transition to a green and digital future.


AVAILABLE HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us on social media

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube