Youth Unemployment, Labour Precariousness & Gender: A Statistical Analysis of the Deterioration of the Spanish Youth Labour Market Since 1985.

The Spanish labour market is notorious for its high general and exceptionally high youth unemployment rates and labour precariousness, temporality and under-employment have by now become its general characteristics. Though diverse studies describe the current situation, few have centred on the development of the Spanish youth labour market over the decades and considered gender differences. In this paper, we present two mathematical models, developed with data from the Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (official Spanish Statistics). We have analysed the data of the contracts of a large sample of the Spanish workforce over the 1985-2015 period, using several statistical models. In concrete, we consider the median annual income of the sample by year, daily working time compared to a full-time contract by year and median length of the contracts. Moreover, we differentiate between regional locations and sexes, adding, hence, further dimensions of difference to our analysis over time. Our results show, amongst others, clear gender differences beyond the gender pay gap, an abrupt change in trend for the year 1999 and onwards regarding the daily working time and a linear downward evolution of the contract length since 1996. Our analysis of this data gives, in summary, statistical evidence of a significant deterioration in the quality of the employment of the young adult population in Spain.