Youth unemployment and self-employment: trends and perspectives

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to research the relationship between youth unemployment and self-employment in the EU and categorise particular EU countries as the countries with youth self-employment driven by push factors or pull factors. It has been revealed that statistically significant relationships between unemployment and self-employment among young people from the 28 EU countries, in only 7 countries have been identified. Of these, Greece, Italy and Cyprus, the unemployment rate among young people would decrease if national governments were to reduce unemployment through self-employment support measures. In other countries such as Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Malta, it would be inappropriate to reduce unemployment through support for self-employment. In other EU countries, fighting youth unemployment requires addressing other labor market issues, such as the reluctance of businesses to employ unqualified or low-skilled young people, reducing the chances of reducing the tax burden when hiring young people, making flexible use of education opportunities with employment. The fact was confirmed that is inappropriate for all countries (in this case EU countries) to apply universal strategies to combat unemployment, because by means of theories and pilot studies on the establishment of statistically significant relationships, it is possible to avoid mistakes by directing support to the needs of target groups.