Abstract

This chapter is concerned with young adults’ employment before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the recent recession. Using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we examine a range of employment indicators and draw comparisons between the countries and regions of the EU. We show that young adults have fared markedly worse over the recession than their prime-aged counterparts, and that their experiences have varied enormously across Europe; we discuss the nature of these differences, and the possible reasons for them.

Introduction

The recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007/2008 was a genuinely global phenomenon, in that it led to declining growth across large swathes of the world's economies (IMF 2009). However, the effects of the recession were by no means uniform, with many official reports and social commentators noting that emerging economies had fared much less badly than predicted, and in particular much less badly than the economies of the wealthier Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Economist 2009; United Nations 2015). Within regions and groups of countries there were also variations: Ball (2014) notes that within OECD coun tries, losses in output from the recession ranged from almost nil in Austria and Switzerland to over 30 percent in Greece, Hungary, and Ireland. And within individual countries, the recession has impacted differently on different groups in society. The young have been hit particularly hard: Bell and Blanchflower (2011) draw on data from many countries to argue that young people have suffered disproportionately high rates of job loss and unemployment; analysis by the UK's Institute for Fiscal Studies (2015) shows that while wages among the general workforce had largely recovered to their prerecession levels, young workers’ wages had not.

This chapter considers a range of employment indicators relating to the lives of young people across all twenty-seven member states of the European Union, over the years leading up to the recession, the recession itself, and its aftermath. As well as unemployment, work in the context of wider activity profiles is considered, and phenomena that particularly affect young adults, such as temporary work.