Youth Unemployment and Employment Trajectories in Spain During the Great Recession: What Are the Determinants?
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Verd, Joan Miquel; Barranco, Oriol; Bolíbar, Mireia Article Youth unemployment and employment trajectories in Spain during the Great Recession: what are the determinants? Journal for Labour Market Research Provided in Cooperation with: Institute for Employment Research (IAB) Suggested Citation: Verd, Joan Miquel; Barranco, Oriol; Bolíbar, Mireia (2019) : Youth unemployment and employment trajectories in Spain during the Great Recession: what are the determinants?, Journal for Labour Market Research, ISSN 2510-5027, Springer, Heidelberg, Vol. 53, Iss. 4, pp. 1-20, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12651-019-0254-3 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/216678 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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J Labour Market Res (2019) 53:4 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-019-0254-3 Journal for Labour Market Research ARTICLE Open Access Youth unemployment and employment trajectories in Spain during the Great Recession: what are the determinants? Joan Miquel Verd1* , Oriol Barranco1 and Mireia Bolíbar2 Abstract Since the beginning of the recession period in Europe, unemployment has greatly afected the young adult popula- tion. In this context, Spain is regarded as an extreme case, due to its exceptionally high youth unemployment rates. This article seeks to identify the determinants that have led certain groups of Spanish young people to sufer labour market trajectories with higher levels of unemployment and instability during the Great Recession than others. To do this, retrospective data from the 2012 Catalan Youth Survey are used. With these data and using cluster analysis, a typology of labour market trajectories is constructed. Next, multinomial logistic regressions are used to identify what individual socio-demographic characteristics and pre-crisis employment experiences are connected to these diferent typological career paths. Results show that the highly diferentiated career paths are associated with diferent social profles and diferences in the presence of unemployment. Moreover, interesting diferences among the most unsta- ble career paths appear. For the most vulnerable social profles the employment trajectory prior to the crisis seems to point towards the existence of an entrapment in low-skilled jobs that alternate with situations of unemployment. For those with a slightly better position their employment situation after the initiation of the crisis seems to have been impacted by their brief labour market trajectory before the crisis and their resulting work experience gap. Keywords: Spain, Unemployment, Great Recession, Youth, Labour markets, Employment trajectories JEL Classifcation: J24, J64, Z13 1 Introduction Te destruction of youth employment in Spain dur- Spain, along with Greece, Italy and Croatia, is one of ing the Great Recession must be explained by the sensi- the countries in the European Union where unemploy- tivity of this population group to economic downturns, ment has hit young people the hardest during the Great which historically and all over western countries pro- Recession. In its aftermath, unemployment among Span- voke a growth in unemployment above the average found ish workers under 25 years of age reached peaks above for the overall population (Lefresne 2003; Verick 2011; 50% in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Since these peaks, the youth Choudhry et al. 2012; ILO 2016). However, the exist- unemployment rate has been slowly declining, although ence of country-specifc characteristics that produce in 2017 it continued to be above 35% (Spanish Labour enormous variations among the countries of the Euro- Force Survey). pean Union must also be taken into consideration (Pas- tore and Giuliani 2015; Dietrich and Möller 2016). In addition, although in Spain many have come to speak *Correspondence: [email protected] of a “lost generation”—more so in the media than in the 1 Centre d’Estudis Sociologics Sobre la Vida Quotidiana i el Treball (Sociological Research Centre on Everyday Life and Work-QUIT), Institut strictly academic world—referring to all young people in d’Estudis del Treball (Institute for Labour Studies-IET), Universitat a generic manner, there are major diferences in the rates Autonoma de Barcelona, Building B. Campus of the Universitat Autonoma of unemployment among young people with diferent of Barcelona, 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallés, Barcelona, Spain Full list of author information is available at the end of the article social profles. As a result, to obtain a complete picture © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Verd et al. J Labour Market Res (2019) 53:4 Page 2 of 20 of youth unemployment it is necessary to also take into with having a stable career path during recession, thus account the socio-demographic characteristics of young having a protective efect against unemployment. How- people and their type of insertion in the labour market ever, this is the case only for those workers not employed (Freeman and Wise 1982). in the most precarious labour market segment. For the Te primary objective of this article is to identify, from most vulnerable social profles the length of the employ- a sociological perspective, what determinants are associ- ment trajectory prior to the crisis had no efect. Tere- ated with youth unemployment in Spain during the Great fore, the research reported in the article shows that the Recession, addressing both socio-demographic char- determinants of youth unemployment are better under- acteristics as well as factors connected to career paths. stood when taking into account the existence of diferent Moreover, the article has the objective of framing the layers of labour market segmentation in Spain, and not analysis of unemployment in the kind of labour market only the diference between primary and secondary seg- trajectory developed by young workers. Tus, instead of ments- or stable and unstable segments. considering unemployment as a single dependent vari- To our knowledge, there is no published research yet able, the article considers periods of unemployment in evaluating the role of unemployment in the development connection to other events in the individual’s labour of employment trajectories among young people during market trajectory, making explicit in this way that unem- the Great Recession in Spain. Our analysis complements ployment should not be understood as an event isolated that of López-Andreu and Verd (2016), who use panel from the labour market segment in which career paths data1 to analyse the segmentation of career paths among develop. Accordingly, the analysis presented is designed young adult workers (individuals between 20 and 40 years to discern between the infuence of what we call ‘social old) for the period between 2007 and 2011. Teir analy- factors’ (socio-demographic characteristics of individu- sis, which uses a multinomial logit model, identifes the als) and ‘career factors’ (the length and quality of the importance of industrial sectors and family background labour market experience) on the kind of labour market in the development of trajectories for the population trajectory undertaken during the Great Recession. considered. For the period prior to the recession the few To fully develop these initial objectives the article existing analyses that have addressed the question of adopts a dynamic perspective. Firstly, employment tra- employment trajectories (Hernanz 2003; García-Pérez jectories are constructed by means of a cluster analysis to and Muñoz-Bullón 2011; Verd and López-Andreu 2012)2 permit us to identify diferent types of career paths with have revealed the important role that the combination of diferent levels of unemployment and instability associ- unemployment and temporary contracts plays in the tra- ated with them. Secondly, multinomial logistic regres- jectories of employees with low educational levels, trap- sions are used to examine the degree of association of ping them in unskilled jobs from which it is difcult to