Current levels of youth unemployment need to be understood in the context of increased labor market flexibility, an expansion of higher education, youth migration, and family legacies of long-term unemployment. Compared with previous recessions, European-wide policies and investments have significantly increased with attempts to support national policies. By mapping these developments and debates, we illustrate the different factors shaping the future of European labor markets. We argue that understanding youth unemployment requires a holistic approach that combines an analysis of changes in the economic sphere around labor market flexibility, skills attainment, and employer demand, as well as understanding the impact of family legacies affecting increasingly polarized trajectories for young people today. The success of EU policy initiatives and investments will be shaped by the ability of national actors to implement these effectively.

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Using aggregate time-series data from post-war Hungary, we investigated the effect of child-related benefits and pensions on overall fertility and fertility by birth order. The results indicate moderate effects that are robust across a wide range of specifications. According to our estimates, a 1-per-cent increase in childrelated benefits would increase total fertility by 0.2 per cent, while the same increase in pensions would decrease fertility by 0.2 per cent. The magnitude of both effects increases by birth order; this is more robust for child-related benefits.

This chapter investigates how changes in employment and poverty relate to each other across the European Union’s Member States. Large employment volatility was accompanied by sizable changes in poverty rates between 2005 and 2012. Based on panel regression results, the poverty to employment elasticity was estimated to be around 25% on average. The role of changes in the poverty rates of individuals in jobless and non-jobless households and of changes in the share of those in jobless households differs greatly across countries. The success of poverty reduction depends to a large extent on three factors: the dynamics of overall employment growth, the fair distribution of employment growth across households with different levels of work intensity, and properly designed social welfare systems to smooth out income losses for families in need.

This paper investigates consistent poverty, defined as living at the risk of both income poverty and material deprivation. Using EU-SILC data from 2012 we analyze patterns of consistent poverty across EU member states and the main individual and household-level factors predicting this status. Our results show that consistent poverty is present in all Member States, although there are fairly large cross-country differences in its extent. The share of those living in consistent poverty is highest in the New Member States and the Southern countries. Living in consistent poverty is associated with several household characteristics. Those living in consistent poverty are more likely than those in severe material deprivation or income poverty to live in bigger families, to have lower levels of education, and to have weak or non-existent links to the labor market. In addition, they evaluate their financial circumstances as being worse, ceteris paribus.