engleski

Unemployment distribution by education level in European countries: Does the location matters?

Cooperation of countries, with similar unemployment and educational level characteristics could be crucial in finding appropriate and fast solution to reduce unemployment in a country. The goal of the paper is to investigate whether neighbouring countries have similar unemployment structure or not. In the paper unemployment structure according to education level is observed for 40 European countries in 2017. For the purpose of the paper four education levels are introduced: less than basic, basic, intermediate and advanced. In order to get reliable results, from the analysis are excluded unemployed persons who could easily continue their formal education. In other words, unemployed persons aged 15-24 are omitted from the analysis. Due to different retirement ages in the observed European countries, in the paper unemployed persons aged 25+ are observed. Descriptive statistics analysis has shown that an average European country has 0.84% unemployed persons with education level lower than the basic one, 25.60% with basic education level, 46.46% with intermediate education level and 26.10% with advanced education level. Quite similar structure of unemployed persons is when they are observed according to the gender. However, there are some differences in unemployment structure if basic education level and advanced education level. Namely, males tend do have more unemployed persons with basic education level in their unemployment structure than females (28.00% and 22.75% respectively). On the other hand, females tend do have more unemployed persons with advanced education level in their unemployment structure than males (30.45% and 22.43% respectively). If European countries individually are observed, it can be concluded that the highest share of unemployed persons with education level lower than the basic one, in its structure, has Turkey (5.90%). The European countries with the highest shares of unemployed persons with basic educational level, intermediate education level and advanced educational level are Malta (66.00%), Lithuania (70.70%) and Russia (48.10%), respectively. In order to group European countries according to their unemployment structures observed by educational level, non-hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted. The K-means clustering approach was used to obtain four clusters of European countries. The cluster analysis has shown that neighbouring countries do not necessary tend to have similar unemployment structure according to the education levels. If the cluster results on overall and gender level are compared, it can be concluded that there are five groups of countries that can be found always together. However, there are no groups with only direct neighbour countries. In addition, it can be found seven countries that are not consistently grouped with other countries. The main limitation of the paper is that the unemployment is observed only by taking into account educational levels and that only data from just one year have been observed. In the future research in the analysis should be included other significant variables that are important in describing achieved unemployment level in a country. Furthermore, in the future research all European countries should be included.

education level ; European countries ; K-means clustering approach ; nonhierarchical cluster analysis

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