Youth inacivity Percentage of youths aged between 15 and 19 who are not in education nor in employment On average, across the countries for which data are available, around 7.7% of teenagers were neither in school nor at work in 2004. Differences across countries are large: in Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Poland less than 4% were in this situation while the shares exceeded 10% in Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Turkey. For the OECD as a whole, there has been a decline in the percentages of all teenagers who are neither in employment nor education, but the decline has been most marked for females. The fact that young people, and particularly females, spend more time in education than they did a decade ago has contributed to this. Several features of the labor markets and training systems affect the ease of transition from school to work.
