Revue Internationale de Politique de Développement (Jan 2022)
The Italian Puzzle of the European Youth Guarantee
Abstract
Focusing on the European Youth Guarantee (YG), this chapter explores why the funds for a specific EU co-financing 2014‒20 programme actually got to be spent in Italy—completely and on time. Thanks to a methodology that combines a set of indicators—spending input and output, regional divide proxies, the positive exit of young beneficiaries, outcomes, target achievement, the penetration rate of actions, and the logical framework approach to detecting problems and finding solutions—the chapter analyses why the same initiative may, in certain areas of the country, provide counterexamples to the overall mapping of the spending of EU funds, due to regional economic and social gaps and unclear multilevel governance, targets and sets of indicators. By conducting a multidimensional exercise, the chapter shows that an evaluation focused on national data input and output does not reveal the real impact of the YG on the country. It argues that national monitoring does not necessarily reveal the limits and causes of the efficiency and effectiveness of such an initiative. Lack of spending, late spending, low target achievement and misdirection of resources are examined in order to shed light on the effectiveness of YG measures in facilitating young individuals’ transition into the labour market. While a macro-regional and regional analysis of input, output and outcome data will show how the Youth Guarantee success is mainly linked to the development of local youth labour markets, the logical framework problem tree will help identify the primary causes of the limited impact of the national YG scheme and identify efforts to be made to remove these causes. Such a removal would in the future increase the impact of the YG if accompanied by a higher level of management skills among the Public Employment Services personnel involved and the full digitalisation of the public bodies involved in the process.
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