The European Youth Guarantee: A systematic review of its implementation across countries

The European Youth Guarantee (YG) is one of the most innovative labour market policies of recent years. It arrived at a time when an urgent and radical response was needed to address the detrimental long-lasting consequences of long-term unemployment.

This article examines empirical evidence on the effectiveness of past youth guarantee experiences, as well as the few existing evaluations of the YG, to identify the factors that are key to their success. We then assess whether the key success factors are embedded into the implementation plans published by the European countries and the extent to which these objectives have been met in practice.

Our analysis shows that while most of countries have established clear eligibility criteria and appropriate institutional frameworks, and are providing a comprehensive package of measures, many of them are still facing challenges when meeting the objectives of early intervention and effective enforcement mechanisms. Finally, although countries’ initial spending in the national YG schemes has often outpaced planned expenditures, in many instances resource allocations have not been sufficient to match the recommendations.