Why is Youth Unemployment So High in Southern Europe?

While unemployment has been coming down in Europe, it's especially high in Southern Europe and among young people, so why is this? In this video, we'll break down the data, the economic and structural factors that underpin in and whether it can be fixed.

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00:00 Introduction
00:52 Data & Context
02:25 Economic Stagnation
03:59 Labour Market Issues
05:30 Low Education & Skills
06:47 Young People’s Attitudes
08:14 Nord VPN

[TLDRnewsEU]

CORRECTION: At 1:45, we say that "even within Italy and Spain, unemployment rates are higher in the North than the South". As the graphs show, this is incorrect, and we meant to say "unemployment rates are LOWER in the North than the South". Apologies for this sloppy error, and we hope you nonetheless enjoy the video!

[triconex]

You were wrong when saying that living more with parents makes people have difficulty to find a job. Actually, it's the opposite : if a person gets a good job, he'll move out to his own house. But it's hard to leave our parent's house when almost all jobs pay 1k per month (or less) and renting an apartment is more than that.

[federicosalvati]

Amazing video but you got one thing wrong. Young people's incapability of finding a good job makes them live longer with their parents not the other way around.

[steliosavramidis]

This is an excellent take allow me add that:
- There is a lot of “black” economy where people are working with no contract or insurance. Just money exchanging hands
- Working rights and conditions are horrible. This combined with young staying with their families leads to higher unemployment

[antoniosntonas]

As an undergraduate student living in Greece I can say that this is an excellent take but I would like to note a couple of things:
Most 18-26 year's old workers that work either part-time with their studies or do not study and work full-time, work uninsured without contract. This results to unemployment being recorded much higher than it actually is. The working conditions are terrible and the whole of the Greek culture enables that. Until your late 20s it is generally acceptable to live with your parents, thus there is no need to have an actual income on paper and assets under your name.
The "standard" timeline for a young Greek is : Finish School at 18, Study for at least 4-5 years in uni (add 2 years for a masters degree), If male get into mandatory military service for at least 1 year. So that creates an environment in that young adults cannot be independent at least before 25.

[FranciscoCorreia]

In Portugal, companies think giving a job is a priveledge, plus the salaries are shit and that is done by design and not only by goverment regulations, so we will just continue doing what we always do, leave our country

[mecharoo]

temporary contracts are also huge in the Netherlands, it's crazy how they don't want to hire people on permanent contracts and will pull every trick in the book to make you go away.

[ForestRaptor]

Something that has become VERY COMMON that has jumped out to me in the past 7 years is the lack of Hirees for the amount of Work that needs to be done. A LOT if not ALL the people I know are overworked and can testify to increase in job responsabilities and expectations for results increase with little to no increase in pay or benefits.

Employers, especially of bigger structures, are reluctant to hire to alleviate the workloads and favoring temporary hires for the VERY HIGH DENSITY seasons.

[akaviri]

There are huge issues in the "Data & Context" section :
1:47 The data for Spain shows youth unemployment to be higher in the south, not the north; while the data for Italy is GDP per person, which isn't quite the same.
2:03 The data for Greece shows unemployment to be lowest in Attica and Cyclades.

[kjkj]

Simple: why work if you can’t afford rent and bills?
Of course they stay with parents - even if they would work full time they wouldn’t be able to move out 😂😂
Young Europeans have to understand that cheap workforce benefits only corporations… While keeping wages stagnant and unliveable.

[marianalourenco]

Im 22. I finished uni just to be faced with the reality that a degree was not going to be enough to find a job. Entry-level job ads with 3 years plus of experience?!? It's so stupid. The truth is that when you fished 5 years of studies, you still have to go through a 2 year period of interviews, interships, and loads of bullshit to be hired. I was the best in class, and it gave me nothing.

[Valerio_the_wandering_sprite]

As an Italian, I doubt I will return home after spending over 6 years abroad as an exchange student and volunteer, unless things will change on a scale never seen before. I'm currently working as Flight Attendant, and, for being an entry position, I find it much better than most jobs I could have found and applied for back home, usually post-graduate internships or seasonal jobs. Not to mention the anachronistic wage rate.

[sinerwal]

As some other people said, employers are not hiring young professionals, because even with good education you lack practical skills. However when noone is willing to hire young people they can’t gain on the job experience needed to make them more desirable assets on the labor market.
Another issue is that a lot of companies are willing to hire immigrants who they can exploit instead of investing in training young people.
If this mentality where hiring young people is considered risk rather than investment, EU economy will suffer in the very near future.

[ricequackers]

Salaries are also quite low for skilled jobs, often ridiculously so. I've heard of €30k or even lower for software engineers in southern Europe. It's no wonder that I've met a disproportionate number of Spaniards, Italians and Greeks working in software in the UK.

[MirKoTrio]

As a 29 years old italian, i’d say neither youth education or unemployment are the problems. Brain drainage is. Most of the talented people I know have worked or are working abroad, leaving the less educated ones in Italy and making it look like there’s a Higher youth unemployment. Young Italians are working, just not in Italy. They are working in better paying economies such as germany or even australia, or in better paying tax havens such ad Ireland or Swizerland.
And while Europe’s lamenting the low pil growth of Italy, they don’t seem to despise the inflow of skilled workers which helps with the lower PIL growth of Italy, causing high debt, high taxation and worst paying jobs.
It’s a runaway cycle that norther europe’s exploiting.

[RD-fsvn]

The numbers regarding education level are influenced by immigration in those countries. For example, a lot of skilled workers with higher education diplomas are leaving Portugal looking for better jobs/wages/lives abroad in countries like, the Netherlands, Ireland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, ...

[TheTTax]

Please always add Y-axis numbers in your graphs, otherwise it's hard to compare the numbers! for example at 1:10, 3:02, 5:11 and at 6:54 we have no way of knowing if the difference between the all of those bars is 0.00005% or 10% or 30%? if the Y-axis goes from 30% to 31% then even if all of them are at 30, something % it looks like there is a big disparity when they're all the same in reality. or vice-versa.

[sousasemze]

30% of young people in Portugal have already left the country! It's depressing and makes me wonder what am I losing by remaining here...

[albertodv]

Talking about northern italy, there's another thing to say. It's difficult to study and graduate when you know that after at least 6 years of pain for bachelor and master's degree (in engineering) you can find only two paths available: entering the job market at 1300 euro/month (if you're lucky, cause most of us are paid less than 1k €/month) and hoping in 1500 euro/month after 5-10 years experience, or continue with a PhD to be even less paid for other 5-10 years.

All of that while most of your friends which decided not to study in uni are working from years now gaining at least 1800 €/month selling ice-cream or driving for amazon, and now they're all buying a house and building their life while you hope to do this after your 40s.

I don't know you, but in this situation it's understandable why most young italians decide not to study in uni

[BeniPT]

EU sending more money won't fix the problem if the system stays the same, it will just delay it