Europe to accelerate early financing for youth initiative

The European Commission has proposed to make €1bn in pre-funding available to member states in efforts to kick-start youth employment programs.

The Youth Employment Initiative (YEI) was proposed by the European Commission in 2013 as a means of reinforcing and complementing projects run by the Youth Employment Package and the Youth Guarantee Recommendation.

The European Commission is proposing to increase the current YEI pre-financing rate by up to 30 times, meaning that member states could receive around a third of their allocated €3.2bn fund to pay for youth education, training, and apprenticeship projects in advance.

Commissioners estimate that this accelerated pre-financing could improve opportunities for up to 650,000 young people this year.

The unemployment rate among 15-24-year-olds in Europe currently stands at 21.9%, equating to over 5m people. More than a third of these young people have been jobless for over a year.

Jochen Kluve evaluates youth labor market interventions, concluding that employment-boosting programs work best when they comprise a mixture of job-search assistance, counseling, training, and placement services.

The benefits of apprenticeship placements are already being acknowledged across Europe. As Robert Lerman discusses, training and retaining apprentices can ensure that a firm’s employees have mastered a common set of skills, and lower recruitment costs. He also notes that an apprentice’s contribution to production is often large enough to offset most costs to firms.

Read more here.

Related articles:
Youth labor market interventions, by Jochen Kluve
Do firms benefit from apprenticeship investments? by Robert Lerman