For young people, the transition between education and the labour market is often not a straightforward path moving seamlessly from school or university to their first job, but can be much more diverse.

Compared with people in other age groups, this makes the classification of the population aged 15-24 years into employed1, unemployed or economically inactive harder to analyse. As a result, it is useful to provide users with additional information on how unemployment is measured and how it interacts with education.

Today, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, issues two new Statistics Explained articles on “Youth unemployment” and “Participation of young persons in education and in the labour market.” The articles explain concepts and definitions used to describe the structure of the youth population in a comprehensive way, in order to facilitate the interpretation and assessment of related statistics for users.

In the EU28, there were around 57.5 million persons aged 15-24 years in 2012, of whom 18.8 mn were employed, 5.6 mn were unemployed (forming together a labour force of 24.4 mn persons) and 33.0 mn were economically inactive.

The high number of inactive young people is mainly explained by the fact that many are still participating in education programmes. The share of young people in education gradually declines with increasing age, which leads to a growing labour market participation3 of young people as they grow older.

Eurostat publishes two different indicators of unemployment among young people: the youth unemployment rate and the youth unemployment ratio. While the former expresses the number of unemployed persons aged 15-24 as a share of the labour force of the same age, the latter refers to the share of the unemployed within the total population of the same age.

In the EU28 in 2012, the youth unemployment rate of 23.0% shows that more than 2 out of 10 young people in the labour force were unemployed, while the youth unemployment ratio of 9.7% indicates that 1 out of 10 young people within the total population aged 15-24 years was unemployed.

Because not every young person is in the labour force, the youth unemployment rate does not indicate the share of all young people who are unemployed. Youth unemployment rates are frequently misinterpreted in this sense.

Among the Member States, the highest youth unemployment rates as well as ratios were registered in Greece (55.3% and 16.1% respectively) and Spain (53.2% and 20.6%), and the lowest in Germany (8.1% and 4.1%). Malta stood at 14.2% and 7.2%.

The difference between youth unemployment rates and ratios is entirely due to the number of young people outside the labour force, which is particularly high for this age group since many of them are still in education.

Being in education and being part of the labour force (employed or unemployed) are not mutually exclusive, meaning that there can be an overlap between participation in education4 and in the labour market which is possible at any age.

However, this situation is far more frequent among young people due to their transition from school or university to working life. In this regard, three typical cases are: an apprentice, but also a student with a small side job, are part of the employed population; a non-working student who is currently available for work and actively seeking work is counted as unemployed; and a person exclusively in education and neither employed nor unemployed is considered as part of the economically inactive population.

Taking a closer look, the EU28 population aged 15-24 years can be broken down into the following categories:

18.8 million were employed, of which: 6.7 mn were in education, including apprentices and students with small side jobs, and 12.1 mn were not in education.

5.6 million were unemployed: of which 1.3 mn were in education and 4.3 mn were not in education.

33.0 million were economically inactive: of which 29.0 mn were in education and 4.0 mn were not in education.

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