STA, 8 August 2018 - Young people in Slovenia are mostly happy with their lives. Half of the 15-29-year-olds have a job and eight out of ten live with their parents, statistics released ahead of International Youth Day show.
People aged between 15 and 29 represented 15% of Slovenia's population at the end of 2017. Numbering 312,000, the youth population decreased by 22.8% in a decade, according to the Statistics Office.
Seven percent of young people were married in 2017. The last available data, from 2015, show that 4.9% lived in consensual union, of whom 75% had children.
Labour market statistics for 2017 put the youth employment rate at 51%. At 55%, the rate was higher among men than women, at 46.8%. Youth represented 17% of all people in employment in the country.
Their average monthly gross earnings in 2016 were only 66% of the average monthly gross earnings paid to all people in employment in the country.
Among the young people with a job, about half (48.6%) had open-end employment contracts and 27% had fixed-term jobs. The others were in other short-term forms of work.
Of the 162,000 young people with a job, 32,000 worked through student job agencies and 5,000 were agency workers.
The youth moved away from their parents at an average age of 28. Women were a year younger and men a year older when they left their home.
The proportion of the young who live with their parents stood at 79.3% in 2016, which is substantially above the EU average of 65.7%.
As many as 12.3% of young people lived at risk of poverty last year. The rate was one percentage point above the rate for the whole population and compares to the EU's at-risk-of-poverty rate of 21.6%.
Although the rate was 2.3 points lower compared to a year earlier, the at-risk-of-poverty rate for young people in Slovenia increased by 3.2 percentage points in a decade.
A survey conducted in 2017 shows that most young people are happy with their lives in general, rating it at 7.9 on the scale of zero to ten. Women were slightly happier than men.
Almost all young people (96%) had a drink or meal out with relatives or friends at least once in 2017, and most (93%) spent a small amount of money for themselves on a weekly basis.
One out of seven (69%) regularly attended paid activities such as concerts, sports events and recreational activities.
Designated by the UN to raise awareness about youth issues, International Youth Day has been observed on 12 August since 2000.
