Luis Pinedo Caro
Over the years the NEET concept as a measure of youth disengagement has grown in popularity and has even been adopted as an international standard as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is a simple idea measuring how many young people neither work nor study while simultaneously creating stigma not only on purportedly lazy, hopeless young people (fairly or unfairly), but also on everyone whose focus and time is devoted to non-market activities. This brief has the twofold aim of investigating the definition of “student” as well as the extent to which young people are involved in the care and the social economy, de facto opening the definitions of employment and studying to non paying activities. It is found that once we account for informal learning activities, intention to study in the near future, the care economy and the NGO sector, the NEET rate in our sample goes down from 35.5 per cent to 19.4 per cent. Moreover, we show that the care economy is rather small (2.7 per cent) among young (18-29) people, hardly explaining observed gender differences in labour force status, and the non-profit sector of Istanbul benefits from the time of 5.6 per cent of the survey respondents, although those who participate are mostly employed (two thirds vs one third).
doc. ResearchBrief283
pdf. ResearchBrief283