This article analyses the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) concept and related indicators and its effects on both youth policies and the perception of young people. It is argued that a "weak version" of social exclusion is often used to explain the phenomenon. This leads both to defective policies (as a "victim blaming" approach tends to be developed instead of structural policies) and to the negative labelling of the NEET young people (as research and policies tend to focus on the individual's deficits and thus associate them with negative values). An alternative indicator is proposed, aimed at reducing the heterogeneity of the situations the concept includes and focus on the core NEET group. This restricted concept centres on those individuals who do not seem to have any objective impediment to study or work. Figures are calculated for the Spanish region of Catalonia and results show a lower proportion of people in a NEET situation; that the NEET rates for young people and adults are similar; that the phenomenon is not new; and confirm that it is related to the risk of social exclusion. These results reinforce the need for an approach which is more sensitive to inequalities to improve our understanding of the NEET population and to avoid the stigmatisation of individuals, generations and countries.
This article analyzes the impact of the economic crisis on the patterns of transition followed by Catalan young people. In particular, it does so by examining to what extent the crisis has affected the extension, de-linearization, reversibility and diversification of their trajectories. These processes have been detected at the European level and are often linked to a context of greater opportunities. The article focuses on Catalonia, an example of a familistic youth regime. Results show that, in a context of crisis and for the Catalan case, transitions take longer, linearity and reversibility increase and, although vulnerability rises, the typical trajectories remain stable. Thus, risk avoidance, mostly through family support, has become even a more dominant strategy than during the expansive economic period. This reinforcement of the traditional pattern of transition, in which the family of origin has a central role, is expected to strengthen social reproduction.
The globalization process has an impact at the micro-level on life-course patterns: concretely, the trajectories of young people into adulthood are being sharply modified. At a European level, the extension, delinearization, reversibility and diversification of youth trajectories have been identified as major changes. However, the extent to which these changes affect young people within each country depends on their respective welfare regimes. This paper analyses how the Mediterranean welfare regime shapes youth trajectories among Catalan young people and explores the hypothesis that these constraints will make those trajectories less sensitive to the general trends of change identified at a
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