NEET Policies and Knowledge in Arab & East Central European Economies

Abstract This research analyzes the policies related to those youth that are not in education, not in employment, and not in training (NEETs) in the Arab and the East Central European (ECE) countries. It attempts assessing the impacts of knowledge on policies related to NEETs. The empirical framework used is based on measures of knowledge such as the number of reports published by the European Training Foundation (ETF) for each country. The number of studies that relate to education, training, and to the labor markets represent the independent variables. Furthermore, this paper assumes that joining the European Union, as it is the case for ECE countries, benefits these economies through the available strategies and policies related to youth, mostly to the NEET category. Findings indicate that the more publications for a specific country, the more the NEETs decrease. Still, among the studied Arab countries, only Algeria and Morocco show this trend. For ECE countries, only Bulgaria and Slovak Republic benefit from joining the European Union (EU) by reducing the category of youth that are NEETs with the remaining countries having no statistically significant effects. These findings require that further knowledge is needed mainly in Arab countries even though Morocco and Algeria appear to behave differently. Such a knowledge is likely to induce more policies targeting the NEETs