Youth unemployment and active employment policy in France: from diagnosis to evaluation.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the causes of youth unemployment in France, and the effectiveness of the active employment policies that have been deployed in their favor since the 1970s. The first part presents a diagnosis. It attempts to determine to what extent the factors generally put forward - primarily the cost of labor and training - have played a role in the emergence and maintenance of high youth unemployment. The analyses are conducted in a comparative perspective - with particular reference to the American and German experiences. The second part deals with active employment policies and their evaluation. The first chapter analyzes the deployment of these policies since the 1970s, as well as the reasons why firms use the different schemes and the effects of these schemes on the beneficiaries. The second chapter presents a framework for macroeconomic analysis of active employment policy for young people, and, in a second step, presents an estimate based on quarterly data of the effects on youth unemployment in France of changes in the minimum wage and the deployment of the various measures. The last chapter presents an evaluation method that uses, at one stage, a macroeconomic model, and applies it to the measures deployed in favor of young people in France between 1985 and 1994.