Studies involving international comparison are among the most elaborate, protracted, and difficult of research projects. This is because of the great effort needed for the coordination of the participating groups of researchers and for achieving measurement comparability across varying national and cultural contexts. The subject—youth, work and youth unemployment—can only be understood at all appropriately if it is considered in relation to a nation's particular economic, social, and educational policies.

In this chapter, I initially explain why European youth unemployment is a fruitful subject for international comparison. I then develop some hypotheses about youth and youth unemployment that can be subject to empirical test. I question whether the educational policy of the past 20 or 30 years, particularly, that which has promoted the academization of the educational system, has contributed to reducing the problem of youth unemployment or whether it has helped to produce youth unemployment. Because demographic change is being increasingly affected by migratory processes in Europe—at least in the case of the Central European countries—migration also must be taken into consideration.

Three years ago it would have been fairly easy to write this chapter, first, because it was quite simple to define Europe as Western Europe and Southern Europe (including Portugal and Spain) and, second, because the European Community (EC) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as the great number of research cooperation projects between various European institutions, made it easy to identify institutions and colleagues who could work together on such a subject.