Following up on the achievements of the Year of Youth, the report analyses youth mainstreaming practices in 33 European countries, with a focus on youth regulatory impact assessment (RIA) instruments in four EU Member States: Belgium (the Flemish Community), Germany, France and Austria. In the absence of a common term used to designate such instruments, the paper refers to them as ‘youth checks’.

This comparative analysis of the youth checks is a first attempt at delineating the workings of these instruments, highlighting their differences and similarities, and contributing to the exchange of best practices among countries and peer learning.

The paper consists of five sections. The first one introduces the concepts of youth mainstreaming and youth impact assessment (YIA). The paper then proceeds to describe the instruments of YIA at the EU level, with a particular focus on the Commission’s better regulation agenda. This is followed by an overview of the YIA practices across European countries. Youth checks’ features are deeply described in the third section. Procedures in place in each of the four Member States are also explained in detail and analysed in a comparative perspective. The fifth and last section concludes with an assessment of the results of the youth checks in terms of the consequences for draft legislation.