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Over the past decade, the number of young people neither in employment, education, or training (NEET) has reached a seriously high level in many European countries. Previous studies have illustrated the heterogeneity of this group and that they differ considerably across Europe. However, the reasons of these cross-country differences have hardly been investigated so far. This study explores how the rates of different NEET subgroups are conditioned by various institutional configurations by applying fuzzy-set Quantitative Comparative Analysis for 26 European countries using aggregated EU Labour Force Survey data from 2018. The analysis reveals that institutional causes of being NEET are as diverse as the group itself. Thus, high levels of young NEETs with care responsibilities are found in countries with a lack of family-related services in conjunction with weak formalised long-term care as it is true in mostly Central Eastern European countries. In contrast, high rates of NEETs with a disability are prevalent mainly in Northern European countries where generous and inefficient disability benefit schemes exist that create false incentives to stay away from the labour market. Finally, high proportions of unemployed and discouraged young NEETs are found in those countries hit hardest by the crisis and with high labour market rigidities, low vocational specificity, and a lack of active labour market policies like in the Southern and some Central Eastern European countries. The results illustrate that young people face very different barriers across Europe and that country-specific measures must be taken to reduce the number of NEETs in Europe.

It is contested to what extent public employment services (PES) help build resilience in young unemployed people. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 19 people born in Germany and Norway between 1990 and 1995, the article examines stories about how PES, in two different activation regimes, help young people find meaningful work. The analysis and discussion are carried out within a theoretical framework that combines the capability approach with social resilience literature in a novel way. The findings show that PES are portrayed as being more present in young Germans' lives. The German informants seem to feel undue pressure from PES and they describe differences between personal aims and the “placement priority” of PES. Sanctions imposed by PES were also a much more predominant topic among the German informants. The Norwegian data were dominated by stories about young people in activation programmes who had been demotivated by being trapped in a cycle of programme participation, which did not result in employment. Across the two countries, our data suggest that PES rarely build social resilience: PES provided young people with a means to survive, but rarely helped to build their capacity to overcome their difficult situation. In line with previous research, the stories of young Germans and Norwegians also emphasise the need for a PES that provides tailor‐made services that build on young people's motivation and ambition. The article demonstrates that combining the capability approach with social resilience theory enables a dynamic perspective on the development of people's capabilities.

In the wake of the Great Recession, youth labour market integration has become a central issue in both national as well as EU policy, e.g. in connection with the European Youth Guarantee. In this context, public employment services (PES) are considered central actors in promoting youth labour market integration. However, since international comparative analyses are scarce and the role of institutions and policies is thus rarely explicated, it is still an open empirical question whether and in which context PES can fulfil such a key role. Therefore, we analyse two questions based on the EU-LFS 2016 ad-hoc module: (i) How relevant is PES support to young people with different educational levels in finding a job? (ii) How do differences in the educational system and in labour market policies shape the relevance of PES support across Europe? This study illustrates that in countries with highly stratified, standardised and vocational-specific educational systems the relevance of PES is comparatively high in particular for the low-qualified. Thus, those countries have good reasons to strengthen PES to support the most disadvantaged and to combat labour market inequalities.