EU youth employment: the Court of Auditors demands lasting results

Youth employment, the accounting magistrates observe, has long represented one of the main challenges that EU member states have to face on the labor market. Although the unemployment rate of young people between 15 and 29 years old decreased from 20% in 2013 to less than 12% in recent years, the probability that young people are unemployed is always double that of the total workforce. In 2025, there were around 4.7 million young unemployed people in the EU, equivalent to 11.6% of the workforce aged 15 to 29.

“EU support for youth employment must prove to produce results over time – he says Carlo Alberto Manfredi SelvaggiECA member responsible for the audit – without clearer objectives and demonstrated long-term results, it is difficult to know whether public funds are truly making a difference for young people.”

Although responsibility for youth employment policies lies primarily with Member States, the EU plays a coordinating and supporting role. Provides strategic orientationsespecially within the annual cycle of coordination of economic, social and budgetary policies through the European Semester and the national reform programmes, which have now been replaced by medium-term national structural budgetary plans. Since the Youth Employment Package was introduced in 2012, the EU has dedicated significant resources to supporting young people’s access to work.

Since 2014 the EU has allocated approximately 25 billion euros of cohesion policy specifically to support youth employment, through the European Social Fund (ESF), the Youth Employment Initiative (YEG), React-EU and the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+). Italy and Spain together receive approximately half of the funding (almost 47.5% of the total). EU-supported measures include hiring incentives for employers, training and work support activities for young people and actions to help them stay in work after being hired.

A fundamental objective of the measures, the Court recalls, is sustainable inclusion in the labor market, which means, among other things, ensuring that young people not only find a job, but remain employed after the end of financial support. For accountants, job retention after 12 or 18 months could be a valid indicator of the effectiveness of the measures. Instead, longer-term result indicators currently only show the employment situation of beneficiaries after six months. The Court therefore concludes that the Commission only has i“fragmentary” information on the longer-term results of EU financial support for youth employment.

We also found that the operational programs examined did not provide a clear definition of when a person can be considered to be successfully integrated into the labor market. The objectives look like this less clear and increases the risk that EU funds are allocated without sufficiently specific or measurable objectives. The Court warns that the design of hiring incentives may therefore be inadequate, with the risk of an “ineffective and inefficient” use of public money.

The hiring incentives examined in the audit were “poorly targeted” to those who need them most, increasing the risk of public funds funding jobs that would have been created anyway. We also note that the incentives were not linked to on-the-job training which is important. Training
can in fact not only improve employability of young people in the long term, but also help respond to the needs of the labor market, especially in sectors that have difficulty finding the skills they need.

Furthermore, the audit highlighted the specific situation of young people outside the labor market, i.e. those who are not working and not actively looking for work, referred to as “inactive” young people. These must overcome social, health and educational obstacles that go beyond labor market policy alone. We note that, although the current EU framework requires targeted awareness-raising activities, inactive young people remain the most difficult group to target.