Validación del procedimiento según el criterio de experto

This thesis started out with the research question “How has the Czech and Slovak public sector adapted to reduce the number of youth not in education, employment or training (NEET) between 2011 and 2019?”. In the attempt to answer that question in this thesis, all documents of the European Semester on Czechia and Slovakia were analysed in order to evaluate what measures have been passed to tackle the issue of NEET in their countries. While both countries had a relatively stable social security system, as can be seen by the low rates of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion, their economic situations were rather dissimilar, nevertheless, both faced rising NEET rates as a consequence of the crisis.

The sub-questions formulated to assist in answering the central research question were

“How did the rate of NEETs develop between 2011 and 2019 in Slovakia and Czechia?”

“What measures have Slovakia and Czechia passed in order to tackle the issue of NEET?”

To answer the former, the NEET rate in Czechia and Slovakia developed in similar ways. Figure 26 shows how the rate evolved in percentage points. Despite a similar development, it is interesting to note that the Czech rate of NEET stabilised after 2014, with only very marginal changes, while the Slovak rate seems to be more volatile. More explicit values for the development of the rate of NEET are found in the annex.

Figure 26 Changes in the NEET Rate. Own Elaboration based on data from Eurostat (2019k) -0.05 -0.04 -0.03 -0.02 -0.01 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Changes in the NEET Rate

SLK - NEET

(% of population aged 15-24)

CZ - NEET

61 A discussion of the measures passed is found in the preceding analysis section. In summary, from among the thirteen policies suggested to be effective by NEET literature, roughly half got consistent attention in the analysed documents, some were mentioned as rising problems but lacked specific measures (e.g., early school leaving) and some were not mentioned at all (e.g. teen pregnancies).

While early school leaving is generally accepted to be one of the most influential predictors for becoming NEET, the only measure taken to tackle that particular issue in Czechia and Slovakia so far has been of a pre-emptive nature, aiming at improving the satisfaction with the education system, capturing potential early school leavers’ motivation and thus increase the likelihood of them staying in school. However, measures to incentivise employers to hire these particularly vulnerable people were lacking.

Next to early school leaving, teen pregnancies and the subsequent childcare obligations tend to be the most determining factor for young women to become NEET. Here, the problem is reversed. There are no preventive policies mentioned in any of the documents, but much effort is put on increasing the availability of high quality, sustainable and affordable childcare, which nevertheless remains problematically low.

While there have also been a striking number of policy plans targeting young people directly, these have struggled with reaching NEET. Nevertheless, the rate of NEET has been decreasing significantly. Since, the documents only indicate incremental progress on most important dimensions and even setbacks on some (early school leaving), it is worth considering that the general economic situation could have a stronger impact on the NEET population than any of the measures implemented between 2011 and 2019.

Finally, to answer the central research question, much of both Czechia’s and Slovakia’s public sector’s efforts to reduce the NEET population was centred on the one hand on more personalised counselling, improved secondary education, increasing the attractiveness of VET programmes and on the other hand on increasing labour-tied social benefits while reducing labour unrelated benefits.

5.1Reflection on the limitations of the study

From the offset, this study was designed to be a descriptive longitudinal study. The principal sources for the analysis were two types of documents, the National Reform Programmes and

62 the Country Reports of the European Semester, both of which form part of the European Semester. During the analysis, additional documents were accessed to supplement the information obtained from the documents from the aforementioned source. A major limitation in this methodology was that while the Czech government translated a number of major policy documents into English, the Slovak government did not. Therefore, supplementing documents (e.g. MŠMT, 2014) could only be accessed in one case and thus in a certain form limit the comparability of both cases. Furthermore, not all versions in both series of documents (i.e. NRP and CR) were available in English, thus reducing the overall amount of data available. Lastly, the section on Performance Management required detailed policy descriptions, which were only available in a limited form within the EU documents. Most importantly, the attached tables on reform measures undertaken by the two governments were only available two and four times respectively out of the total nine documents.

Knowledge of Slovak and Czech could have proven useful to add additional policy documents, which could have improved and deepened the analysis by a considerable margin. Moreover, given the limited data available, it was not possible to adequately perform data triangulation. The use of government documents can be problematic because every government has an interest in presenting their own country in a particularly good light. While the EU or in this case the European Commission might be less biased, the documents are not subject to scientific rigour either and, lacking a scientific review process they could be deficient in scientific objectivity.

5.2Opportunities for further research

This thesis offered a descriptive insight into measures taken by the Czech and Slovak government attempting to tackle the issue of NEET in their country. Although the NEET rates have been ultimately declining, further research could show how effective the measures were. The current research did not intend to establish any causal relationships, nor to assess the strength of those relationships. After obtaining the relevant data, however, an exploratory study could reveal the strength of these relationships between the NEET population and the measures passed by the respective governments. Additionally, researchers native to either of the countries could analyse any of the types of policies from this thesis to assess whether they indeed proved to have an impact on the NEET population, by accessing national policy data and, if deemed necessary, qualitative data from interviews with, for instance, policymakers, experts or beneficiaries of the programmes.

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