According to the Eurostat, in 2020, across the EU27 member-states, the proportion of NEETs was higher in rural regions when compared with the same rate in cities. More importantly, a substantial uneven NEET distribution by the degree of urbanization was evident in many Eastern countries such as Bulgaria or Romania or Southern countries such as Greece. In these countries, gaps between cities and rural areas ranged from 10 to more than 20 percentual points.

The research community is reacting slowly to this trend. A recent bibliometric review confirms that from 324 papers focusing on NEETs published on the Web of Science, between 2002 and 2021, only 16 focused on rural NEETs.

Paul Flynn from Ireland and Emre Erdogan from Turkey offer a summary of the special issue “Challenges Associated With European Rural NEETs Youth Inclusion” promoted by the Rural NEET Youth Network.

An important message coming out of this episode is that rural NEETs deserve to be considered as specific subgroup of NEETs, to the huge territorial disparities between urban and rural areas across Europe. These differences come to affect greatly youth future prospects.

(Contains excerpts of "Dream Come True": https://bit.ly/3iZdeMd , "Little Idea": https://bit.ly/3JW5LJV and "Think BIG": https://bit.ly/3J9Np7b , all by Scott Holmes Music, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 )