Decomposition of trends in youth unemployment – the role of job accessions and separations in countries with different employment protection regimes

We examine the drivers of youth unemployment in Poland and Spain, countries where youth have a marginalised labour market position. We decompose the trends in unemployment rates in 1990-2011. We disentangle the role of prolonging job search and the impact of dismissals. The contribution of these two factors to the changes in unemployment rates is compared between youth and the reference group of prime-age workers. We show that in both countries, youth had actually higher chances of finding jobs than the prime-age workers during last two decades. However, the probability of job separation among youth was persistently higher. Moreover, the youth job separation risk reacted to recessions much stronger than the prime-age group risk. In Poland the disparity between the impact of job dismissals on changes in unemployment rates among young and prime-age men is relatively lower than in Spain, which could be ascribed to countries’ differential employment protection regimes.