ABSTRACT
The immediate future of Europe depends upon the 58 million Europeans aged between 15 and 24 who have been hit hard by the economic crisis. According to the latest Eurostat figures, the youth employment rate in Europe was 32.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014, one of the lowest levels ever recorded in the history of the European Union. Equally, in February 2015, the youth unemployment rate in Europe reached 21.2 per cent, a steep increase from the 15.7 per cent of July 2008. This means that at present approximately 5.5 million young people are unemployed in Europe. While youth unemployment is not new in the European policy agenda, the extent and the scope of the phenomenon has led the European Commission and Member States to increase their efforts in order better to understand the vulnerabilities of young people in respect to their labour market participation. In this regard, traditional indicators of labour market participation have been often criticized for their limited usefulness for youth, as they do not appropriately frame the situation of young people. For example the information provided by the youth unemployment rate refers just to a limited part of the young people population as many of them are students and hence are classified as being out of the labour force. Moreover as it just captures those who are looking for a job it does not include other populations as the young mothers, the discouraged workers or young people with disabilities who are classified as inactive with the risk of remaining excluded from the policy debate. For this reasons, researchers, national authorities and international organizations have started using alternative concepts and indicators to broaden the understanding of those young people who are disengaged from both work and education and are arguably at a high risk of labour market and social exclusion. In this framework, the term NEET (not in employment, education or training), and the related indicator, started to be increasingly used to refer to these young people and since 2010 has entered into the EU policy agenda. This short chapter describes how the term NEET entered in the European agenda and provides a brief picture of the size and the composition of the NEET population in Europe.
