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| Skanderbeg Square in Tirana full of young people (archive) |
Albanian State institute of Statistics (known locally as INSTAT) reported that 25.5% of young people aged 15-24 in Albania had no engagement in 2019, while in Kosovo in the same year 33% of young people were the same.
In other countries of the Region and the EU, this percentage is much lower.
In North Macedonia, in 2019 only 18 percent of young people were neither at work nor at school. The category of "lazy" youth has experienced a significant decline over the past two years in Macedonia, as in 2017 Macedonia had 25% of young people neither at work nor at school.
In Montenegro the percentage of young people who neither work nor are at school or university is 17%, while in Serbia 15%, while in EU countries this indicator was 10% in 2019.
The labor market situation of young people in the Western Balkans is characterized by high passivity, high levels of continuous unemployment, employment in the informal sector, and high emigration.
Youth labor force participation in the Western Balkans was low in line with European standards and remained almost unchanged in recent years.
In 2018, the employment rate reached close to 20 percent for people aged 15-24 compared to 35 percent in the EU. The employment rate was particularly low for young girls compared to boys.
Even young people in employment are mostly temporary contracts. 1 in 4 new employees is with a temporary contract.
Poor quality of education, which fails to meet the demands of labor markets, is considered one of the main causes of the high youth unemployment rate in the six Western Balkan countries.
There is also an opinion from experts that the communist past and the centuries-old occupation of the Ottoman Empire have influenced this situation of the Albanian youth. In Communism people were not productive in their work (the main reason of why the communist system failed) and mostly received their wages without really working. While in the Ottoman Empire on Albanian lands prevailed the military character, where young people went through the battles of the empire and the piracy, where another part lived in the mountains looting and guarding caravans in agreement with the Ottoman Empire. Thus a really small number of artisans worked really hard.