The distribution of adult training among European unemployed: Evidence from recent surveys

The importance of a highly skilled workforce has become increasingly relevant in the context of the European Union’s new strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth — ‘Europe 2020’. Policies encouraging wide participation in continuing training are therefore an important component of lifelong learning strategies. This paper aims to investigate the determinants of adult education for the unemployed compared to workers using the two main European surveys on training, namely the Adult Education Survey (AES) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Our work demonstrates a significant difference in the capability of these two surveys to capture the participation in adult education programmes in Europe. After having estimated a probit model on both datasets, we find that, overall, unemployed adults in Europe tend to participate less in training than workers, especially in non-formal training. However, this result is statistically significant only for the estimates from the AES. Furthermore, both surveys highlight the key role played by country-specific institutional settings in determining the participation to adult training. Overall, this work shows that the AES is the most reliable data source for policy making in the field of adult participation to education and training.