School to work outcomes during the Great Recession, is the regional scale relevant for young people's life chances?

The debate on territorial cohesion and spatial inequality recognisesthe role and influence different scales have on individuals’opportunities with extended effects especially for young people’slife chances. In particular, a regional perspective into territorialdisparities of socio-economic conditions and welfare in Europeprovides a more fine-grained view on the existence of territoriallydiverging income and labour market conditions for youth that anational level analysis is not able to grasp. This paper focus onregional differences in school to work outcomes of young peopleusing macro-panel data covering the period from 2005 until 2016.We use a plurality of indicators to study to what extent school towork transitions are better studied at regional level and tocharacterise those transitions in a more comprehensive way. Ourfindings demonstrate that there are huge differences both in thelevel and in the dispersion of young people’s school to workoutcomes across European territories. This tells us that theallegedly assumed national homogeneity of transition systems candefinitely not be taken for granted. Moreover, we show that theGreat Recession had strong but differentiated impacts at regionallevel.