The working paper, co-authored by Marianna Filandri (University of Turin), Lia Pacelli (University of Turin) and Francesco Trentini (CCA – YEPartnerSHIP), uses the available longitudinal information provided by EU-SILC to develop a new categorization of the individual NEET profiles based on their persistence in the state. The contribution of the paper is manyfold. First, the authors explore the usefulness of the combination of longitudinal measures and cross-section ones; indeed, comparing the two measures allows identifying the share of more fragile NEETs, which is not immediately apparent from cross-sectional measures, as it depends on the persistence in the state. Secondly, the authors observe the characteristics that are correlated to being in a NEET state and find results in accordance with the literature: young women and less educated are the categories among which the incidence of the most severe NEET conditions is higher. Finally, by means of multilevel regression estimates, the authors find that aggregate GDP growth can be a driver for reducing the probability of a young person to be a NEET if, ceteris paribus, s/he has a more resilient condition, i.e., experienced a long spell or a high number of spells in employment, education or training in the period of observation. On the contrary, family support policies are relatively more effective on less resilient individuals. These findings support the argument for which there is a hierarchy of policies to support people to exit from the NEET condition: lower-level activation policies, such as family-support ones, that increase the participants to the labour market or to education at the extensive margin and market-based policies that increase the intensive margin and work best for more resilient NEET individuals. Conversely, lacking activation policies makes market- and incentive-based policies not effective for the most fragile sub-population.

The working paper is available in the publication section.