The European Social Fund (ESF) is the EU’s main financial instrument for supporting actions to help people with difficulties in finding work or affected by social exclusion. In response to the acute levels of youth unemployment following the crisis, additional funding was also provided through the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI), which was targeted at regions where youth unemployment was higher than 25%. In order to try and alleviate the problem, in February 2016, the Council of the European Union adopted the Recommendation on the integration of the long-term unemployed into the labour market (the LTU Recommendation). This study assesses the extent to which the ESF and YEI have supported people on long-term unemployment and how this funding has contributed to the implementation of the LTU Recommendation. The analysis is complemented with in-depth case studies of operational programmes in Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain, which consider the different types of intervention used and what has been successful.

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