Social Investment and youth labour market participation: a EU regional analysis

In this paper, we first rely on small area techniques to derive from EU-SILC survey new indicators of compensatory and investment policies at regional level. While compensatory policies have mainly the goal of protecting individuals from “old” risks (e.g. old-age), investment-related social policies tend to focus more on “new social risks” (i.e. skill deficits). We rely on these new indicators to perform a data-driven SVAR analysis to investigate the casual relationships between youth labour market outcomes and these two types of spending. Our results support the view that investment policies are more effective for tackling new social challenges.