Italy’s Youth Policies Leave the Most Vulnerable Behind
As EU recovery funding ends, research on young people outside work and education shows why internships and hiring incentives are not enough. A commentary by Pietro Galeone
Turning the EU’s Anti-Poverty Strategy into Action
IEP Bocconi and the European Commission bring together researchers, policymakers and civil society to discuss affordable housing, access to quality jobs and policies to tackle poverty.
Speakers include Pietro Galeone, who will join the session on “Quality Jobs and Protection Against Poverty”.
9 October 2026, 10:00–17:00 | Bocconi University, Leonardo Del Vecchio Building, Room N01, Piazza Sraffa 13, Milan.
These are busy weeks at Italy’s labour ministry and regional labour departments. As the country moves beyond the recovery funding that supported GOL, its national active labour market programme, work is under way to design the next generation of employment measures.
This process should give greater weight to a priority too often taken for granted: youth employment, which is crucial at a time of demographic decline.
Fewer births today mean fewer workers in 20 years, and a narrower contribution base to support pensions, healthcare and care services for a growing elderly population.
What matters is not just how many young people we have, but how many we enable to find stable employment, how productive they are and what technologies they have at their disposal. Wage levels and job quality also matter if staying in Italy is to be an attractive option.
Yet Italy continues to squander an increasingly scarce resource: its young people. High levels of inactivity coexist with low tertiary educational attainment and worrying levels of youth emigration.
Young people, however, are not all alike. The acronym NEET describes those not in employment, education or training, a category in which Italy has long had one of the EU’s highest shares.
In recent years, the share of NEETs has fallen as labour market conditions have improved. But the challenge remains substantial.
In Italy, the NEET label has too often conjured up the image of a young person lounging on a sofa. Yet the category includes both unemployed people briefly between jobs and young people with disabilities who struggle to find work; both recent graduates taking time to travel or volunteer abroad and young mothers who leave employment to care for their children because childcare services are unavailable.
These groups have very different circumstances. Each needs policies that address the specific reasons keeping its members out of work.
The problem is that youth policies in Italy have largely relied on subsidised internships or hiring incentives, without distinguishing adequately between different groups or offering tailored support to overcome the obstacles they face.
This is the central finding of research I conducted with Tito Boeri and Edoardo Cattaneo, drawing on several sources of data.
Active NEETs, who are available for work and actively looking for it, follow very different trajectories from inactive NEETs. Between 2014 and 2019, 25–29 per cent of the former moved into employment each year, compared with just 16–19 per cent of the latter. Inactive young women were substantially less likely to enter employment than inactive young men.
These figures are not a story of youthful laziness. They reflect obstacles that conventional employment policies often fail to recognise. Young people in work who experience poor mental health, for example, are more likely to become NEETs the following year.
In the survey used in our study, around a third of under-30s report psychological distress, rising to 42 per cent among NEETs. Employment services cannot afford to ignore this.
Another barrier is unpaid care. The birth of a child increases a young woman’s probability of becoming an inactive NEET by almost 10 percentage points; for men, no statistically significant effect emerges. This is the employment consequence of inadequate childcare provision, high costs and an unequal distribution of family responsibilities between women and men.
It is not an obstacle that a training course or an internship offer can remove.
The Youth Guarantee, Italy’s main active labour market programme for young people between 2014 and 2020, worked when registration was followed by a concrete offer. In more than half of cases, that offer was an internship. But what use is an internship to a mother who has no one to look after her child?
The most vulnerable are therefore less likely to receive public support. The probability of receiving an offer was about 4 percentage points lower for those with young children. A higher estimated risk of psychological distress was also associated with a lower probability of receiving an offer.
A policy intended to support vulnerable young people thus ends up reaching those who face fewer barriers more easily, while failing to reach those who need it most.
The lessons of the Youth Guarantee are therefore valuable for the policies now being designed. We must avoid replicating youth programmes whose performance is measured by the number of people registered for support, training courses delivered or internships arranged. Age alone does not define a homogeneous group: different barriers require different solutions.
What is needed is personalised support and new tools to remove obstacles to work. Success should be measured by actual entry into employment, not simply enrolment in a programme, as well as by contract quality and sustained employment over time.
For those experiencing psychological difficulties, one option is to create integrated teams bringing together public employment services, health services and voluntary-sector organisations. Mothers need accessible childcare, support with caring responsibilities and equal parental leave entitlements. Underserved areas need transport, local services and proactive outreach to potential beneficiaries.
This is also the direction set out in the EU’s first Anti-Poverty Strategy, adopted in May.
The European Commission highlights the difficulties vulnerable young people face in entering employment. It calls for stronger outreach and individualised support linked to services, and identifies quality employment as the best protection against poverty.
Employment opportunities that reach only a few, are intermittent or leave people in poverty do not provide a basis for independence or bring young people into lasting employment. Job quality is not a luxury that can be separated from the number of jobs available. It is an integral part of the response to demographic and labour market challenges.
A previous version of this article as published in the Italian newspaper Affari e Finanza - La Repubblica
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
