Europe's big social policy problem, faced by the Union and by national governments alike, is unemployment. That rate is twice as bad as yours. How economies provide jobs for their citizens is an important measure of their success or failure. The employment rate is a telling yardstick. And in Europe, it's too low.
Young people come off twice as badly as older people in terms of unemployment.
One person in two without a job hasn't worked in more than a year. Those who find themselves on the unemployment register are often those with the lowest skill levels. And they fare no better in times of recovery, as in the late 1980s, when around 9 million new jobs were created in Europe. Only a third of those jobs went to the unemployed, the rest to new entrants to the labour force. Although here in the US, you enjoyed much the same sort of growth in the 1980s as we did in Europe, your job creation profile was rather different.