Evaluating the risk of unemployment: comparison between the two most populated Greek regions with the entire country

The basic aim of this paper is to investigate the impact that educational level of individuals and participation in training programmes (apprenticeship, intrafirm training, continuing vocational training, popular training) have on their job prospects in the two most populated Greek regions, Attica and Central Macedonia, during the implementation of the first Community Support Framework, CSF (1989–1993). We also research the differences between the two regions under study and the entire country. 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 aggregate statistics for Greece conclude. The findings of the logit model show that although concerning education the picture is mixed, the more trained a person did not improve his position in the labour market during the examined period. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse individual anonymised records (microdata) of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for both employed and unemployed at both national and NUTS-2 level.