Many books, journal articles and opinion pieces have been written about the youth unemployment issue, and it is certain that a great many more will be written in the future. Economists and other social scientists have done an adequate job in pointing out the causes and consequences of the problem, and they have often helped politicians, governmental officials and the business community with the design of policies and programs that try to address it. Yet as we have seen throughout these chapters, knowledge and data do not appear to be compelling enough reasons to motivate the implementation of actions that could dramatically reduce the youth unemployment rates in Southern Mediterranean countries. This, of course, begs the question of why the apparent disconnect, if the proposed interventions do not require a complete reorientation of a nation's basic cultural values? Five hypotheses are offered, recognizing that they are not entirely mutually exclusive.

Good policy advice often goes unheeded

There are two policies, that is, minimum wages and governmentsubsidized, public sector jobs and job training, that not only fail to reduce unemployment but actually may contribute to its increase. Economic theory suggests that if you raise the price of any commodity, including labor, the demand will decrease. A recent high-profile experiment conducted in Seattle, Washington, provided an example of what usually occurs when the minimum wage is raised in a local labor market (Jardim et al, 2017). In 2015 the city raised its minimum wage from $9.47 an hour to $11.00. In 2016 the wage was raised again to $13.00. Spanning data from all industries in Seattle, these economists report that in 2015 the disemployment effect produced an elasticity of less than -1, and in 2016 reductions in employee earnings in the low wage market produced a staggering elasticity of -3. You will find the same sort of negative relationship acknowledged in any standard labor economics text (for example, Borjas, 2008).

Public sector ‘make work’ and job training have also been widely studied. Caliendo and Schmidl (2016) undertook a study of 37 evaluations of active labor market policies directed at youth in Europe, and reported that public sector work program had ‘zero effect’ on subsequent job quality or stability. Card et al (2017) come to much the same conclusion in their meta-analysis, noting medium term impacts of -1.1% and long-term effects of zero.