Education and Unemployment in European Union Economic Cycles

Dominating in scientific literature position is that the level of education has direct influence to the unemployment level and this influence is as high as up to five times lower unemployment rate for professional degree holders than the workers having no high school diploma. The EU statistics shows much weaker interaction between these two variables. The objectives of the paper are to assess influence of education level to the employment level dynamics in different stages of EU economic cycles and to reveal factors, influencing difference of the correlation of these two economic indicators in separate groups of EU countries. The findings may be used for the decision making in higher education systems development based on the efficiency criterion, which is directly and indirectly coherent to the factors influencing the unemployment levels and employment creation, evaluating specific for the EU countries factors.