Discouraged young people: the Italian neets who are not seeking work

Abstract

The NEET category includes different sub-groups of young people who are neither in education or training nor in employment: unemployed, discouraged, family carers, inactive. In order to design targeted policies governments have set their interventions by disaggregating the NEET category to focus on these different subgroups of NEET population. The paper aims to provide an analysis of “discouraged NEETs” for the “first generation” (15-24 years old) and the “millennials generation” (25-34 years old). The study aims to investigate the determinants of this condition using the data from the Labour force survey (2017) drawn by ISTAT. The results reveal that, apart from gender, other key risk factors of falling into “discouraged NEET” condition include: belonging to the older 25-34 age group, having very low levels of education, living in the south of Italy, belonging to areas with high youth unemployment rates.