This paper attempts a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the ability of the Italian Active Labour Market Policy (ALMP) to target long term youth unemployed. The European Employment Strategy (EES) has given a new impulse to ALMP as the main tool to fight long term youth unemployment. It...

The aim of this paper is evaluating the impact of training on the employability of young long-term unemployed (18-24) within the EU. The analysis focuses on three countries representing different educational and training systems: Spain and Sweden are examples of a rigid and of a flexible...

The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate on the continuity/fracture of regional patterns of development and employment in old and new European Union (EU) regions. Several contributions in this book suggest that a factor common to all backward regions, often neglected in the...

The focus of this chapter is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatially asymmetric impact on labour markets. EU economies are undergoing dramatic industrial restructuring due to a number of causes, such as the Eastward enlargement and economic integration of Central...

The labour market in Italy is characterised by the following structurally specific features: 1) Regional differentials. In 1996 the unemployment rate was between 7% and 10% in Central and Northern regions, while it was over 21% in the South where, moreover, the participation rate was also low,...

Dropping out of school has recently become an issue of major policy concern in Italy. A series of reforms of secondary school objectives, programmes and organizational design have been proposed to adapt the public school system to evolutions in the labour market and to increase overall...

Le proposte di politiche per l'occupazione dell'Unione Europea sembrano in linea con la strategia individuata dall'OECD in occasione della pubblicazione del Jobs Study nel 1994. L'idea di fondo dell'OECD consensus e' che l'alta disoccupazione europea sia dovuta alle rigidita' delle norme e...

In the last decades, and particularly in the Nineties, the European Economy has been widely characterised by regional disparities. This paper aims to evaluate if different regional economic structures, such as productive mix and labour market composition, contribute to this disarities and to...

The paper analyses the labour market in a framework of New Keynesian Economics (NKE). The aim of the NKE is to provide micro foundations to the main result of the Keynesian model, that is the rigidity of prices and wages as well as the presence of non market clearing equilibria. In the first...

This paper studies regional unemployment inequality in Poland. We find that higher unemployment regions have experienced greater change in industrial structure. We also find high unemployment regions are those with higher inflow rates to unemployment rather than longer spells of unemployment....