Attitudes towards Future Unemployment and European Cooperation to Reduce Unemployment among 8th Graders in EU/European Countries

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the attitudes among 8th graders in European countries on future unemployment and attitudes towards cooperation among European countries to guarantee high levels of employment and strengthen their economies. This article uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches. For the qualitative approach, a systematic literature review was performed using four databases, starting from 16,873 search results for the 2016–2021 period before systematically limiting them to identify possible predictors used in quantitative analyses. The quantitative part uses secondary analyses of data obtained from 52,788 upper secondary students from 14 EU and one EU associated country from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016, which is the last available cycle with publicly available data since 2018. The techniques used to analyse the data are descriptive statistics, linear and binary logistic regression, Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation coefficients, and Principal Component Analysis. This article also considers the theoretical base of the sustainable development definition—it explores youths’ present perceptions of the future in the economic and financial domains.

Dynamics of the Social Security Index in the Context of the Economic Crisis in Romania

“…The Pearson correlation table of the variables indicates that their correlation with the dependent variable is strong and positive in terms of financial indicators (in the vast majority of cases the correlation level is greater than 85%). As we presented in the Section 3, some variables (TEXUN-Total unemployment insurance budget expenditures; EMPL-Active population; HEX-Health expenditures) present non-linear relationships between variables, the most obvious being in the case of TEXUN [4], thus demonstrating that the level of social security is destabilised due to unfavourable budgetary policies [17] and the increasing level of poverty of the disadvantaged population [18].…”

“…In terms of social policies, the issues of discrimination [5] and lack of solidarity [4] are strategic guidelines on which public policy makers need to focus in order to improve social security at European level.…”

“…Social policy analysis was conducted by Kuhn and Kamm [3] based on a sample covering the Netherlands and Spain. Different survey results have found that: European citizens are less supportive of the unemployed [4] than the unemployed among themselves, Europeans with a higher education and who are pro-immigration are more sympathetic to unemployed people from other European countries, foreign citizens are more discriminated against [5], and political parties show no solidarity with unemployed people [4] from abroad. The solidarity of European regions during the economic crisis was analysed by Trein [6], who treats the problem in the same way but at an EU level.…”

“…works of Kluge et al [2], Rotar et al [8], Yong [14], Goniewicz et al [19], Kuhn et al [54], Cappelli et al [9], and Trunk et al [4].…”