Youth Employment in Spain: Flows In and Out During the Great Recession and Employment Stability

Recent labour market reforms have tried to smooth the extremely rough situation of young people in the Spanish labour market. Most of these measures have been focused on the promotion of stable youth employment. The aim of this paper is to assess whether the path into permanent employment has been improved as well as the stability of jobs in the case of young people under 30 years old. The reference period is 2005–2015, and the database is the Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (MCVL) from Social Security. The budgetary efforts to encourage open-ended recruitment have not been enough to increase, the weight of open-ended contracts. Moreover, as other studies on these issues, using probabilistic and duration analysis, the results show that incentives for permanent contracts in the case of young people have not contributed to improve neither the probability to access into a permanent employment nor their level of stability.