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This article aims at assessing the effects of the EES on youth labour market outcomes in the EU-15 countries within the recent decade. With the European Employment Strategy, which was established in 1998, and the Lisbon objectives in education and training, which came into force in 2000, the European Union among other topics started focussing on young people and their chances in entering and succeeding the labour market. The political instrument for the implementation was the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), which aims at taking into account different complex institutional frameworks while formulating common targets that have to be reached using different policies. The analysis of the effects looks at both the output (i.e. the implementation of youth employment policies) and at the outcome dimension (i.e. youth labour market indicators). Within the field of school-to-work transitions, like in other fields of social and employment policy, effects of the EES on the policy making process can be observed, while the effect on the outcome dimension - that is the relative youth unemployment and the employment rate among 15 to 24 years old people - hardly can be detected: Regarding the youth policies that were set up by the national governments, it can be shown that youth labour markets and their institutional frameworks between countries differ in the same way as the effects of the EES and the policies, and so do the outcomes. However, some general trends can be observed. The switch from employment to education issues might be one reason for the lack of empirical success regarding youth labour market indicators. The concentration on education issues has overshadowed the youth labour market policies, which appears in the non-development of such policies as well as in the lack of any empirical outcome effects. Finally, the main result is that, for the EU-15 countries, the assumption that the EES has affected policy making processes could be supported. Furthermore, the degree of effectiveness with respect to the policy making process depends on the degree of pre-existing compliance between the EES and [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of national institutional factors – more specifically, the level of skill transparency of the education system and labour market coordination – in accounting for cross-national differences in the relationship between education and occupational status. Consistent with previous research, our findings suggest that skill transparency is the primary moderator. Countries with a highly transparent educational system (i.e., extensive tracking, strong vocational orientation, limited tertiary enrolment) tend to be characterized by a strong relationship between education and occupational status. These findings hold even after controlling for the level of labour market coordination. Nevertheless, we also find that labour market coordination plays an independent role by dampening the effect of education on occupational status. Taken together, these results suggest two quite different policy implications: (1) strengthening the skill transparency of the education system by increasing secondary and tertiary-level differentiation may strengthen the relationship between education and occupation, regardless of the level of coordination, and (2) increasing labour market coordination could lead to improved social inclusion and a reduction in inequalities related to educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is a crucial determinant of people's life chances, and it particularly affects the integration of youth into labour markets. The article shows how different kinds and levels of education shape the access of young people to jobs of varying advantage and the smoothness of the transition from school to work. It elaborates the common patterns in the relationship between education and early career labour market outcomes and investigates - especially for EU member countries - how varying institutional arrangements in the educational systems and in the regulation of labour markets lead to varying integration outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]