21.10.2022
EXPERTS: POVERTY IS A KEY FACTOR KEEPING YOUNG PEOPLE OUT OF THE LABOR MARKET
Poverty plays a key role in keeping young people in Bulgaria out of the labor market and education, writes an analysis by the Institute for Market Economy. The report of the Institute for Market Economy aims to build the profile of young people in Bulgaria who are neither working nor studying (NEETs).
Unsurprisingly, inactive youth themselves are low-income, but the majority of them live in poor households, creating significant barriers to their activation. The observation is similar in the income distribution - while the working or studying youth follow the income structure of the population as a whole, the inactive ones are close to and below the poverty line.
Bulgaria is among the five countries with the highest share of NEETs in the European Union, which is why there is apparently a need to refocus policies towards them, according to the Institute for Market Economy.
The most important factor that separates active from inactive youth is education – among NEETs there is a much higher proportion of those with primary and lower education, which blocks their access to the labor market.
As the trend is towards increasing the demand for highly educated specialists even for many of the jobs in agriculture and the low segments of industry, we can claim that the realization of the labor market of people with low education will become more and more difficult, it is written in the report.
The Roma are overrepresented among the inactive youth, as among the youth of Bulgarian-Turkish origin there is a much larger share of secondary and higher education graduates. This means that solving the problem of inactive youth is related to the integration of the Roma, experts point out.
The analysis does not establish a great dependence between the state of health and non-participation in education, training and employment among Bulgarian youth - differences are present, but they are not significant. However, there are regional imbalances, with the inactive youth having a significantly larger share in the South-Central and South-East regions of the country.
The data show that housework and childcare are a brake on women's active participation in the labor market. Although a direct relationship between motherhood, care and retention outside the labor market cannot be established, inactive women live in households with significantly more children, and in general more people, which leads to the conclusion that for a significant part of them work in the home is the determining factor for inactivity, the report says.
Currently, most of the efforts to activate inactive youth fall on the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, and in particular the Employment Agency. Part of the problems that keep young people inactive, however, are rather the competences of institutions that deal with health and education policies, or other types of social care. Therefore, closer cooperation between institutions is needed, including through data exchange and profiling of the individual needs of unemployed youth, the Institute for Market Economy recommends.
A significant proportion of inactive youth have dropped out of school after the primary and lower secondary phases, which blocks their access to higher education and limits their access to most segments of the labor market. Accordingly, placing additional emphasis on retention in school can be seen as a de facto prevention of inactivity later in life. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, measures were taken in this direction, but after the normalization of education, they should be restored and even strengthened, the report says.
The integration of inactive women needs specific measures. The importance of women's role in the family environment and childcare means that an appropriate solution for a significant number of them would be a wider advocacy of remote or part-time work. Of particular importance in some parts of the country, and especially in the capital, is access to childcare - kindergartens and nurseries, experts report.
