Assessing the determinants of labour market inclusion for vulnerable European citizens: an eco-systemic and multi-level approach

This paper aims to contribute to the debate concerning which factors influence both labour market participation and the employment status of citizens in the 27 EU member states plus Norway through a regional perspective. Research questions this paper tries to address regard the role played by individual and contextual characteristics on labour market participation and employment, and how these two levels interact with each other. As per the conceptual framework, we rely on the Capability Approach by Sen (1999), according to which, the capability of having a decent work depends on individual conversion factors as well as societal and environmental conversion factors. The dual focus on labour market participation and employment serves two purposes: first, it helps to mitigate issues of self-selection bias that are common in this type of analysis; second, it highlights how various individual and contextual characteristics can have divergent effects on these two dimensions, with significant implications for territorial cohesion and social inclusion policies. Moreover, particular attention will be devoted to labour market trajectories of vulnerable groups. Methodologically, the paper is based on a three-level multilevel analysis using 2010-2022 EU-SILC data and a dataset that provides disaggregated contextual information at NUTS2 and/or NUTS1.