Youth employment in the context of the European Union

Abstract

Short Summary (abstract) The doctoral dissertation “Youth Unemployment in the Context of the European Union” consists of research focused on the nature of and problems related to youth unemployment in the framework of the European Union, with the aim of understanding its main determinants in order to identify the key factors in the design of public policies in order to solve this problem. It has been carried out using a quantitative approach, based on secondary data obtained from EUROSTAT and primary data from a survey conducted specifically for this research. Methodological techniques have been focused on the analysis of the causal relationships between latent variables, for which structural equations modeling (SEM) has been used, due to their suitability in constructing variables that cannot be directly measured and explaining the causal relationships between them, by means of linear regression analysis. This methodology has been complemented with others, such as the comparison of means analysis, in order to study the common characteristics or group differences for specific points. In the era of the so-called “Knowledge Society”, the fundamental aspects related to youth unemployment focus on 1) the role played by education and technology, 2) in the socio-economic environment in which people are living, 3) the specific situation of young people and the risk of falling into discouragement and 4) achieving well-being at work and in life in general. These aspects have been analyzed in four scientific papers that constitute four independent research articles, included in this dissertation. In this thesis, these topics have been analyzed and published in four indexed scientific journals (three of them in the Journal of Citation Reports - JCR and one in the Scimago Journal Citation SJR - Scopus), with the titles: “A New Educational Pattern in Response to New Technologies and Sustainable Development. Enlightening ICT Skills for Youth Employability in the European Union”, “Smart Cities for Wellbeing: Youth Employment and their Skills on Computers”, “Sustainable Development, Poverty and Risk of Exclusion for Young People in the European Union: The Case of NEETs” and “Wellbeing at Work: Self-perception of Workers from a Gender Perspective”. The main results and conclusions indicate that the achievement of individual, labor and social well-being, and the achievement of a balanced, inclusive and sustainable society, is an objective that is linked to the solution of certain problems, such as the one analyzed here, youth unemployment. Consequently, future policies must consider the different profiles of vulnerable social groups to achieve the objective of sustainable development.