How many ni-ni are there in Spain? Or what is the same, how many young people are there who do not study or work? This is the question that the Spanish Youth Council (CJE) has asked, after hearing on different occasions that this percentage exceeds 10%, and in previous years it even reached 15%.
Are there so many young people who do nothing? insist from this entity, made up of more than 60 youth organizations, created by law in 1983 and formed by the youth councils of the autonomous communities and youth organizations at state level. In his opinion, no.
According to the latest official data (Eurostat and the OECD), in Spain the denial rate is 12.7%, but according to the Emancipation Observatory of the CJE, which uses data from the Survey of Active Population, at the end of 2022 the rate was 2.4%. Significantly lower. How is it possible?
To undo this grievance, the CJE research team put a thread on the needle, immersed itself in the studies and came to a conclusion: the reason for these differences is the transposition of the NEET rate (one of the main indicators of the table of social indicators for the European Pillar of Social Rights which establishes the proportion of young people, between 15 and 29 years old, who are not in education, are not employed or receive training) directly, something that casts doubt the Youth Council, which uses “a much more specific and fair description of the situation of young people in our country”.
According to his opinion, it is wrong, at the same time unfair and pejorative, to classify every young person who does not work and does not study as a ni-ni, since there can be different reasons why they do not do one activity or the other.
According to the Youth Council, it is necessary to take into account whether the young person is looking for work or not (a circumstance that the NEET rate does not take into account). Since, they point out, in a labor market like the Spanish one, in which young people are often forced to accept jobs with high temporary rates, “it doesn’t seem fair to us that a young person who has been kicked out of the job, for example, after spending the entire summer season working in the hospitality industry and now looking for a job is classified as a no-no”.
The second factor taken into account by this entity is whether he is available to work, “since a young person who has suffered some incapacity that prevents him from carrying out an activity should not be classified as either labor”, they point out.
And the third factor that the Youth Council considers to qualify or not a young person from ni-ni is whether their inactivity situation is explained because they have an illness, because they have to care for dependents or because they have other personal responsibilities or relatives
“In 2022, 9.8% of young women who were not looking for work did not do so because they were engaged in ‘household tasks’, a category foreseen by the INE. It doesn’t seem fair to describe these young women who are dedicating themselves to care as ni-ni”, they point out from this youth platform.
These three factors collected by the Spanish Youth Council explain the difference of more than ten points with the official figures. But, they insist, their data is more in line with the reality of Spanish youth. For this reason, they request that the way of calculating this rate be changed, which portrays a part of society as vague, useless and without ambition.
