Unemployment Risk in Southern Greece

The basic aim of this paper is to investigate the impact that educational level of individuals and participation in training programmes have on their job prospects in Southern Greece (namely the regions of Southern Aegean and Crete) during the implementation of the first Community Support Framework (1989-1993). We try to see whether the educational level itself and participation in training programmes increased the chances of finding a job. More specifically, we research what are the social and demographic characteristics that increase the chances of someone in the examined population finding a job, how those chances change (if they do) after the introduction of training courses and, also, whether University graduates, in contrast to most of the rest of the EU member states, face greater difficulties in finding a job than non-University graduates, as a series of studies or statistics for Greece conclude. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse individual anonymised records (micro-data) from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for both employed and unemployed in those two regions at NUTS 2 level.