They called it “social spread”. The values achieved in many parts of Europe from youth unemployment allow it to be defined as a "labor cliff". To realize this, it is enough to put Eurostat data on a graph. Out of one hundred young people under the age of twenty-five willing to work, in November 2012 those unemployed rose to fifty-seven in Spain, thirty-seven in Italy and twenty-seven in France. In November 2011, youth unemployment rates stood at forty-nine percent in Spain, thirty-two in Italy and twenty-three percent in France. It is this sharp upswing that describes the "cliff" into which the labor market has slipped in three of the four largest countries of the Eurozone. It happens in Spain, Italy and France. This does not happen in Germany, where the unemployment rate of the under-25s remains firmly established at around eight per cent, the same enviable level that the German economy already enjoyed a decade ago. Rates below ten per cent are now also recorded in the Netherlands and Austria. There is a "labor cliff" represented by the marked worsening of employment conditions, especially for young people, in the large Mediterranean countries which is combined with a "social spread", a job gap that widens between us and the economies of central northern participants in the Monetary Union.
Climbing back from the "labour-cliff" escarpment and reducing the youth unemployment spread is difficult. In a common currency area, occupational and generational imbalances of similar dimensions should be adjusted with the decisive contribution of a common fiscal policy capable of rebalancing the accounts between regions and generations. Unfortunately, despite the theoretical dictates that earned Bob Mundell the Nobel prize for economics in 1999, this common fiscal policy does not yet exist in the Europe of the single currency. Not only. In the face of a crisis situation that continues over time, the different degrees of freedom in the type of responses available on the part of companies and workers also emerge. The mobility of capital allows competitive companies to undertake or consolidate internationalization paths outside the borders of their home countries. Very much however, labor mobility still remains more limited. There is no common labor market in the euro area such as the one that interconnects the fifty components of the United States of America. Nonetheless, the pressure of hardship accelerates the pace of change. A recently released Istat figure indicates that around eleven thousand Italian graduates emigrated abroad in 2011. Exactly three times the number in 2002. They are still small numbers, but sufficient to represent the direction of a painful process of adjustment. The path, new as old, of emigration.
In other historical periods, the emigration of young people represented an almost inevitable response to the severity of a crisis. However, we came out of wars. Young people did not incorporate that human capital, that investment in education with which the current younger generations are endowed today, even in Italy. Today young people are a scarce resource, a strategic resource for competitiveness and development. Let's think of the digital divide, the ability of young people to work with new ICT technologies, with the web and with the new projections of internationalization. Let's think of the importance of young people for sectors such as banking, which inextricably links the prospects for collecting savings in the medium term to the ability of the new generations to access sustainable employment. Today's young people have not known the inflationary and stagflative spirals of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, the crises and the kind of instability of the world that existed in Europe before the arrival of the euro. Today's young people do not know so much the advantages of the single currency as the serious costs of the long recession and their unemployment. We need to climb the slope of the "labor cliff". Work to reduce youth unemployment to recover competitiveness, restore cohesion between generations and form the pro-European conscience of tomorrow.
