Income support and staying in school: what can we learn from Australia's AUSTUDY experiment?

In Australia, as in most industrialised countries, there has been a dramatic increase in unemployment rates over the last three decades. The teenage labour market, in particular, has undergone significant structural changes which have resulted in large increases in the rate of unemployment among teenagers. The proportion of children staying on at school past the minimum leaving age and higher-education participation rates have also been rising over this period. Despite this, the overall full-time education participation of Australian teenagers remains low compared with that in most other OECD nations.