Youth employment partnerSHIP

How effectively are young people supported on the labour market? Project “Youth Employment PartnerSHIP” aims to answer this question by evaluating employment initiatives targeting youth in Spain, Hungary, Italy and Poland.

The European Youth Guarantee (EYG) was introduced in 2013 to combat youth unemployment. Five years in, policies resulting from EYG still lack comprehensive evaluations in a cross-country framework. The countries participating in the project share common challenges of high youth unemployment and low capacity to perform high quality impact studies of youth employment Initiatives.

The project will evaluate two set of initiatives:

• outreach activities of Public Employment Services (PES)
• job trials/job subsidies to different job contracts offered to youth, with a particular attention paid to gender dimension of policy targeting and outcomes.

We will use harmonized methods of evaluation based on similar administrative data, which are little explored in CEE and SE Europe. These evaluation studies will be complemented with RCT (Randomized Control Trials) experiments in Hungary, Poland and Spain. They will assess which interventions have the potential to boost outreach to inactive, unregistered youth.

In addition, the project will build capacity in research institutions to implement evaluation studies of employment initiatives by creating a transnational research network on youth employment policies, internships for PhD students and workshops on evaluation methods for researchers from other institutions. It will also promote the use of impact studies among policy-makers. As a result, youth employment policies can become more effective.

The “Youth employment partnerSHIP - evaluation studies in Spain, Hungary, Italy and Poland” project benefits from 1,8 million € grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment. The Fund supports international project initiatives that promote sustainable and quality youth employment in Europe.