Youth Labour Market Policy in Austria: Consultancy report for the OECD

The report offers an outline of the development on the youth labour market in Austria between 1980 and
1997 and of the most important political interventions in this field. Against this background, the training
initiative of 1997 for solving the apprenticeship crisis is being analysed more closely. It is shown that a
broad political and institutional scope for action is existing in Austria, which allows for searching solutions
of the problems on the youth labour market from different perspectives. Considering the high political
priority of the subject, the partly missing co-ordination of these initiatives proves to be advantageous rather
than disadvantageous, the different parties and persons involved developing political initiatives which
diversify in manner and mode. The approaches towards reforming the apprenticeship system are regarded
as scarcely innovative and many questions concerning the actual situation and the development in this field
are still left unanswered.