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Purpose: This chapter addresses the skills shortages in Kosovo’s labour market, emphasising the service sector. The labour market economy is very dynamic, and Kosovo, with the youngest population in Europe, also has the highest unemployment level among youths. Therefore, we aim to analyse the mismatches of the skills demand in the labour market.

Methodology: The scientific methods used in this chapter are quantitative methods applying analytical and critical approaches based on economic theory. In this chapter, we analysed secondary data from Labour Force Surveys (LFS) and official reports such as the World Bank and UNDP. We have also conducted primary research with the employees of SMEs in the service sector, with specifically related questionnaires for descriptive issues.

Findings: The logit model used in this research has shown goodness of fit and yielded significant results. Based on the empirical findings, we have found a need for some main soft skills such as communication skills, language skills, ICT skills, and additional training to help gain employability skills. These findings suggest that there is a need for more skills in the service sector, significantly impacting the employees’ job performance and the job seeker’s level of employability.

Significance: Noticeably, countries that are still in the transition process face inequalities in the labour market and have a very high level of unemployment. The findings can be used in analysing demand-side management of the labour market and mismatching of skills in transition economies by policy makers.

South Africa’s youth bulge provides both a potential asset and challenge for economic growth. The potential demographic dividend that this youth bulge represents can only manifest if youth are economically active. With youth unemployment above 51% and 7.6 million youth not in employment, education, or training − large numbers of youth are at-risk for long-term social and economic exclusion. This will only perpetuate structural inequality and poverty. In the context of extended lacklustre economic growth, the capacity of the formal economy to create large-scale employment is limited without active interventions to facilitate successful transition and entry into the labour market. This chapter explores the nature of youth transitions in South Africa. It examines the range of ‘failures’ that hamper successful transitions and presents a framework for conceptualising the role of labour market interventions in overcoming these. It then locates the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (Harambee) within the ecosystem of labour market interventions, describing its approach, evolution and the lessons that have emerged for how to support successful youth transitions.

Part 2 of the Special Issue on “School-to-Work Transition Around the World: The Effect of the Pandemic Recession-Global Perspective” focuses on the global panorama of school-to-work transition (STWT). With young people constituting a significant portion of the world's population, their seamless transition from education to employment is paramount for the present and future labor force. This study explores various dimensions influencing youth's STWT worldwide, including education-job mismatch, early career outcomes, young entrepreneurs' profiles, gender and informal sector wage gaps, social capital, social network sites' usage, job attributes and returns to schooling. These insights shed light on the intricate nature of global STWT, offering valuable guidance for policymakers and practitioners. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned ideas.

The study builds on the country-specific contributions of the papers selected in the Special Issue by supporting it with additional literature. Moreover, the study reveals a more holistic and global understanding of the school-to-work transition by zooming out on the specific geographic contexts.

This paper examines the school-to-employment transition challenges in various countries. In Italy, PhD holders face wage disadvantages, especially in physics, engineering, social sciences and humanities. Education positively impacts transition speed, employability and earnings, but effects differ across birth cohorts. Italian women encounter persistent wage gaps, experiencing both a “sticky floor” and “glass ceiling” effect, and in Zambia, working while studying enhances the youth's chances of finding well-matched jobs. Albanian public sector careers rely on political connections over merit, revealing political clientelism. Russian research confirms a 20 percent gender wage gap due to occupational segregation. Polish informal workers generally earn less, with higher penalties for low-wage earners. In Australia, social network site usage yields positive and negative effects on teens' school and work balance. Global analysis reveals varying education returns, with rural areas showing lower returns and women benefiting more than men. Africa and Latin America exhibit higher education returns than Asia and Eastern Europe.

This study provides valuable insights into how various countries address the challenges of transitioning from school to work and identifies the educational and economic factors contributing to a successful transition. Given that extended transition periods, high rates of youth unemployment and high NEET rates continue to be a concern for many countries around the world, the implications of this study are significant and extend beyond national borders, despite variations in the specific circumstances analyzed.

The study summarizes the experiences of specific developed and developing countries concerning youth unemployment and their smooth school-to-work transition. Detailed discussions of country experiences around the globe provide valuable guidance for policymakers and practitioners.

This paper aims to analyse COVID-19’s effects on job loss and job finding rate in Serbia, focusing on groups with already low employment before the pandemic, such as youth, women, low-educated and rural areas.

The authors exploit the panel structure of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) data for Serbia to analyse if the impact of the pandemic on transition probabilities was different for vulnerable groups and their counterparts during the first year of the pandemic.

The results indicate that stagnation in overall employment growth in Serbia during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis resulted from decreases in new hiring rather than increases in job losses. However, trends differed for vulnerable groups. Young workers faced the highest increase in job losses, partly due to their higher shares in informal wage employment. In contrast, decreases in job finding rates were particularly high among low-educated and in rural areas.

After the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, employment opportunities of vulnerable groups further deteriorated, and already existing labour market inequalities were exacerbated. These effects are partially due to policies implemented to mitigate the crisis, which focused on preserving permanent employment while leaving vulnerable workers and groups unprotected.

The authors investigate the annual effects of the first year of the pandemic in a country with a large informal sector and explore the role of vulnerable groups’ job characteristics in transition changes.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

The work compares across cohorts and different levels of education the early-stage evolution of several labour market outcomes, with the aim of studying whether and to what extent education matters for the level, growth and stability of earnings.

By using a rich longitudinal dataset developed from merging survey and administrative data, this article describes the evolution of the early career – five years following the education completion – in Italy comparing differently educated workers born between 1970 and 1984.

The authors find evidence of an "education premium” during the first five years after education completion in terms of faster school-to-work transition, higher employability and higher earnings; moreover, education is associated with positive, faster and more volatile earnings growth, while for those experiencing a downward trend education does not appear to play any role. However, no clear-cut changes across cohorts in the association between the various outcomes and the level of education emerge, thus signalling that no continuous rise of skill premia in the first phase of the working career across cohorts characterises the Italian economy.

The main originality consists in investigating the early career stage by cohort and by the level of education with a focus on many multi-year individual outcomes. Besides investigating the evolution of aggregate outcomes for differently educated individuals born in different cohorts, the authors also focus on individual earnings dynamics along the five years after the education completion.

In this article, the authors study the gender pay-gap (GPG) among graduates in Italy (2011 cohort) who were employed four years after graduation. The authors focus on individuals who are new entering in the labour market or who match a low level of experience with a high level of education.

Aimed at estimating the amount of the differential between male and female average wages, the authors have applied the Oaxaca–Blinder (O–B) decomposition. The results identify the presence of a GPG at the very beginning of graduates’ careers given that, shortly after graduation, women receive lower salaries than men, even after controlling for several characteristics (individual, academic, job and local labour market). The authors completed the analysis with the reweighted O–B decomposition using the recentered influence function (RIF) and the Juhn, Murphy and Pierce and Machado and Mata decomposition approaches.

The results show that the GPG is already present at the very beginning of graduates’ careers, and it increases when correcting for women’s lower level of participation in the labour market. The authors also identified sticky floor and the glass ceiling effects due to the existence of a relevant high GPG both at the bottom and the top of the graduates’ wage distribution.

By focussing attention particularly on graduates, this paper adds to the existing literature a deeper understanding not only of individuals who have recently entered the labour market, but also those who are highly skilled but have little on-the-job experience. In fact, the authors are looking at a particular sample (graduates who are all transitioning from university to work during the same period) with small heterogeneity which allows the authors to compare very similar young men and women graduates and gain a deeper understanding of GPGs in early careers while controlling for confounding and hidden sources of variability.

While the effect of the minimum wage (MW) on employment has been widely studied, less is known about its impact on hirings and separations. Whereas the adverse effects of MW on hiring are quite familiar, results of studies indicating reductions in separations are less expected. This study aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice by performing a meta-analysis, which allows for understanding the real effect of MW on employment's two components: hirings and separations.

Since mixed results cloud understanding of the issue, a meta-regression analysis was conducted. This technique permits understanding the effect of MW on labor market transitions and offers additional explanations for controversial results.

Despite the evidence that MW increasing the turnover and reducing permanence could negatively affect employment, findings from meta-regression analysis pointed out that increases in MW reduce hirings but also separations offsetting the negative effect on employment. Overall, the results imply that the standard finding that MW changes have little or no impact on employment rates reflects offsetting reductions in hiring and separations. Evidence of negative publication bias is also found.

The results emphasize the importance of looking beyond employment rates to understand the impacts of MW. Overall, the evidence implies that the standard finding that MW changes have little or no impact on employment rates reflects offsetting reductions in hiring and layoffs. In addition, the results suggest that MW tends to have a much larger impact on employment flows than on employment levels. This finding has to be considered by policymakers when they make decisions about increasing the MW. These analyses assist in clarifying debates about the effects of MW on the labor market in the changing economic environment and conduct a labor policy in the right direction.

The meta-regression analysis (MRA) conducted in this study emphasizes the importance of looking beyond employment rates to understand the impacts of MW (Brochu and Green, 2013). Overall, the evidence implies that the standard finding that MW changes have little or no impact on employment rates reflects offsetting reductions in hiring and layoffs. Therefore, the evidence from the performed MRA is consistent with those previous meta-analysis studies that found little or no evidence about MW adversely affecting employment and, at the same time, provide additional explanation for these findings. In addition, the results suggest that MW tends to have a much larger impact on employment flows than on employment levels (Dube et al., 2016).

Even though hirings are reduced due to MW, this evidence could not necessarily imply a negative effect of MW on the labor market since job searching or matching is improved. Additionally, the increases in MW could improve the quality of the job and the job attachment, which are consistent with a recruitment-retention model (Dube et al., 2007). The evidence from this MRA, which is consistent with little or no impact of MW on employment, also could imply that although the MW is set relatively high to balance the supply and demand of labor, their level is close to optimal. Setting the right level is also associated with compliance with MW. This issue deserves attention since any adverse employment effects of MW could be strengthened by incomplete coverage. The effectiveness of the entire process of developing, putting into practice and enforcing MW rules hinges on compliance.

As prior meta-regression analysis did not have the same objective, the results of this article move current research forward. Based on the analysis, future research lines are delineated, and some public policy implications are assessed.

The transition of people to the ordinary market after completing the due process of a work integration social enterprise is a critical moment that exposes their vulnerability. This paper aims to present the results of an intervention programme designed to support job search efforts and identify the main factors that contribute to this transition.

This study used a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative data on the programme results were collected through administrative documentation and the Employability Factors Scale. Qualitative data were gathered using focus groups and questionnaires to understand participants’ perspectives.

The levels of employment achieved, improvement in employability and participants’ assessment provided evidence of the programme’s effectiveness. Likewise, having an individual’s support, systematisation of the program and intermediation with ordinary companies were the factors that most influenced the programme results. Therefore, this study confirms the need for personal, systematic, personalised and sustained support over time to facilitate the transition from work integrated social enterprises to ordinary markets.

There are few studies on transitioning from work integration social enterprises to ordinary companies. This study offers a unique view of implementing an employment support programme and its impact on people.