• youth unemployment
• statistical data
• European Union

The unemployment is an important issue for all other groups of society such as adults, women, people with disabilities, migrants and of course, the main goal is the fighting for this problem for the whole society. However, there is also a fact that the problem amongst young generation affects more deeply to the society’s present and future. Furthermore, solving the unemployment problem of today’s youth should be noted that this would mean to solve the employment problem of the adults of the future. Therefore, in this study, the phenomenon of the growing rates of unemployment especially amongst young people is drawn attention and the picture of youth unemployment in Europe will be explored.
Generally, youth unemployment leads to several significant social and personal problems in the areas of physiological, psychological, economic due to that as the most efficient labour capacity, it remains idle, as it will be specified in detail in the study. The lack of homogeneous structure of youth unemployment and also, their very high mobility tend to be a problem with youth unemployment. Correspondingly young people are belonging to the different education, skills, psychological structure, it complicates the solution of the problem. This issue exists as well as almost in all parts of the world, such as both in developed and developing countries as a common problem. The result of this problem is a much more complex rather than it looks actually. For this reason, the changing rates of youth unemployment are calling for changes in policies and it raises some key issues that policy-makers will need to address. Different policies which are the reflection of the education systems, labour market institutions and socio-cultural characteristics of the EU countries have been evaluated by these Member States in the transition of young people from school to work. This can be carried out applying various policy recommendations in the different fields that are described in the current research study.
In order to examine the youth unemployment driving factors and analyse their impact, empirical data was obtained for EU-15 countries as a whole. The statistical data was composed of the different variables, such as minimum wage, youth employment to population ratio, unemployment, poverty rate, GNI per capita, youth population. Then, when data analysis and review of academic literature finished, results and discussions were accomplished in the present paper. This also involved possible recommendations for a more effective development in the countries of EU.