According to a report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA), the European Union efforts to support the integration of young people into the labour market are still not focused on results.

Employment is primarily the responsibility of the Member States, whose efforts are supported or complemented by the EU budget.

Although youth unemployment rates have fallen significantly over the last decade, EU-funded measures still do not focus on supporting the long-term integration of young people into the labour market.

Youth employment has long been one of the most important challenges facing EU Member States in the labour market.

Although the unemployment rate of young people aged 15-29 has fallen from 20% in 2013 to less than 12% in recent years, this age group is still twice as likely to be unemployed as the entire workforce.

In 2025, the number of unemployed young people reached 4.7 million in the EU, or 11.6% of the labour force aged between 15 and 29 years.

“The EU must demonstrate that the support it provides for youth employment delivers sustainable results“, said Carlo Alberto Manfredi Selvaggi, member of the SCC and responsible for scrutiny.

“To see whether public spending on youth is working, there is a need to set clearer targets and to better document long-term results.”

Although the Member States are primarily responsible for youth employment policies, the EU has a coordinating and supporting role.

It provides strategic guidance, in particular through the annual cycle of economic, budgetary and social policy coordination in the context of the European Semester and the national reform programmes, which have now been replaced by medium-term fiscal structural plans.

Since the adoption of the Youth Employment Package in 2012, significant EU resources have been mobilised to support young people’s access to work.

Since 2014 the EU has allocated around 25 billion euro to support young people’s access to work. Since 2014 under Cohesion Policy specifically to support youth employment, including through the European Social Fund (ESF), the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI), the REACT-EU initiative and the European Social Fund+ (ESF+).

Almost half of the funding, namely 47.5 %, goes to Italy and Spain.

The EU-funded measures combine incentives for employers to recruit, training and guidance actions aimed at young people, as well as actions to help them keep their jobs after they have been recruited.

The main objective of the measures is sustainable integration into the labour market.

This means that it is not enough for a young person to find a job, but that they must also continue to work after the financial support ends.

In this context, maintaining a job after 12 or 18 months could be used as a reliable indicator of success.

For now, however, the longer-term outcome indicators refer to the employment status of beneficiaries after six months.

Therefore, the SCC concluded that the information available to the Commission on the longer-term results of EU financial support for youth employment is fragmentary.

It also found that the operational programmes examined did not specify when a young person can be considered to have been successfully integrated into the labour market, which creates confusion as to the objectives and increases the risk of financing measures with EU funds without it being clear what exactly is being sought to be achieved and how.

The SCA even warns that weaknesses in the design of recruitment incentives pose a risk of inefficient and ineffective use of public money.

The recruitment incentives examined in the audit were not targeted specifically at those most in need of work, resulting in an increased risk of financing with public funds jobs that would have been created anyway.

The ECA also found that the incentives were not linked to mandatory on-the-job training, which is important because training not only improves the employability of young people in the long term, but also helps to meet labour market needs, particularly in sectors facing skills shortages.

In addition, the audit highlighted the particular situation of young people outside the labour market, i.e. those who are neither working nor actively seeking work, referred to as “economically inactive” young people.

They often face social, educational or health-related barriers that cannot be addressed through labour market policy alone.

Although the current EU framework provides for targeted outreach and promotion measures, the SCA notes that economically inactive young people remain the group that is most difficult to reach.

It would be advisable for EU member states to more actively engage with young people who are outside the labour market and launch targeted actions by region.

* Konstantinos S. Margaritis is a journalist