Youths’ Unemployment, Migration and NEETs in the Post-Crisis Period

The unemployment rate among youths (22.2%) was more than twice as high as compared with the unemployment rate for the entire active population in the year 2014 (9%). In the context of increasingly higher levels of unemployment, the youths face increasingly more difficulties in finding a job and many of them could decide to extend their period of inactivity on the labour market or to take up studying again. This could represent an investment for the future, provided that market matching skills are acquired. Nevertheless, the reality is that many youths are neither employed, nor studying and these youths are the representatives of the NEET group. The high unemployment and NEET rate among youths leads to decreasing employment chances for individuals and most times to their decision to emigrate. During the last years, the emigration rate increased at world level and the structure on age groups of the migration flows has changed. Thus, young migrants represented in 2013 a third of total migrants at world level. The main reasons for migration among youths are: unemployment, the NEET status, poverty, poor standards of living, issues related to education and, in some instances, the difficult political situation. The paper presents a comparative analysis of the unemployment development, of the NEET rate and of emigration among youths from Romania and in other EU member-states for the period 2008-2014.