Compiles an integrated series of comparative empirical analyses of education-to-work transitions in European Union countries. Individual chapters describe the educational background of young people entering the labour market, address the scope of educational expansion over the past decades, and chart basic structures of transition patterns in European labour markets. Moreover, several chapters examine the role of individual qualifications, and also the impact of recent employment turbulences and structural change in the economy on school leavers' integration into the labour market. From these, the structure of education and training systems emerges as a key institutional factor for facilitating smooth transitions into the labour market. At the level of intermediate skills, vocational training and apprenticeships have retained their advantages, in particular with respect to youth unemployment. As devaluation trends have empirically been limited so far, tertiary level qualifications similarly continue to provide a most attractive inroad into the upper segments of the occupational structure. Youth labour markets, in particular for low-skilled leavers, clearly deteriorated during the macroeconomic turbulences of the early 1990s, however. © Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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