Understanding youth labour market disadvantage: Evidence from south-east Europe

portant policy issue in south-east Europe (SEE). The lack of decent work opportunities for young people is indeed one of the most daunting challenges faced by countries in this subregion. 1 A troubled entry into the world of work has serious welfare repercussions for young people, including a higher risk of income poverty and deterior-ation of their human and social capital. It also induces responses which are not always socially desirable. Yet there has so far been no compre-hensive analysis of the problems that young people face in SEE labour markets, largely because the necessary data are simply not available from any integrated, centralized sources. For the purposes of this study, therefore, an attempt has been made to construct comparable indicators of youth labour market outcomes for ten SEE countries and/or territories based on data from labour force sur-veys (LFSs) and living standard measurement surveys (LSMSs) con-ducted around 2001. The data from these surveys show that more than