Intermediate 
Governments across Europe dream of  nding a magic solution to rising unemployment. But, in the hardest-hit parts of the EU, unemployment continues to rise and the talk does little to reduce the number of people without work.
Now, in a corner of Italy, one mayor thinks he has found an answer to his towns serious lack of work. Valter Piscedda, the mayor of Elmas, a small town near Sardinias capital, Cagliari, wants to pay residents to leave. The council will pay for ten unemployed locals to take intensive English lessons, get on a cheap  ight and look for jobs elsewhere in Europe.
This idea is a result of common sense and experience, the mayor told the Guardian. Over the past year and a half  especially in the past few months  I have been seeing young people, almost every day, who are despairing about their search for work. Some ask for help in  nding it here. Others have tried everything and are so discouraged that they no longer want to stay and wait. And they want to go and gain work experience abroad; life experience, too.
So, my idea was this: put everything in place so that those who want to gain experience abroad are able to, he said.
As the national economy continues to falter, Sardinia, along with much of southern and central Italy, is struggling with high unemployment. Unemployment was at 17.7% in the second quarter of 2014, according to Italys National Institute of Statistics, Istat. More than 54% of people under 25 are out of work.
For the Adesso Parto (Now Im leaving) programme, Elmass council will give 12,000 on a  rst-come,  rst-served basis to applicants aged between 18 and 50. They just have to be out of work and have lived in the town for three years. They do not have to be university educated and their annual income must be no more than 15,000.
The idea of encouraging people to leave is sensitive at a time when huge numbers of Italians  many of them bright young graduates  are leaving their country every year. But Piscedda, who belongs to the Democratic Party of the Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, believes that the people he is sending away might return and give me back 100 times what they were given. More importantly, he wants the scheme to help those most in need.
Its a programme for those with no other resource; its the last-chance saloon. It will allow them the dignity of not having to ask a friend for money or put burdens on families, he said.
Earlier in 2014, he added, the council launched a scheme for businesses  they were given  nancial incentives to hire young workers from Elmas. We advertised 20 of these positions, he said. We got 120 applications.
In Elmas, the scheme has got mixed reactions. The reality is that there is little work here, said Alessandro Macis. The opportunity to go abroad to learn about the workplace and experience other cultures can be very worthwhile. The son of a friend of mine who didnt study much is in London and hes really  nding his way. He started as a waiter. Now, hes a cook and hes learning English.
Others were perplexed. I heard about it but I thought it was strange. If you have that money to pay for people to go away, why dont you use that money to keep them here? said Consuelo Melis, who works behind the bar in a local cafe. On Twitter, one of many reactions was disbelief. The states admission of defeat, commented Marco Patavino. Institutions are raising the white  ag, remarked Carlo Mazzaggio.
Piscedda, however, says of his online critics: Probably, they are people that arent in need ... Every day, I deal with peoples problems and I have to do something to try to solve them. These people, if they had an alternative, they wouldnt be asking for help.
The work I can create, as mayor, is temporary. I can have a piazza cleaned. I can have it cleaned again. I can have the streets cleaned. But these are all temporary things that give nothing beyond that little bit of money for a few months. I want to go beyond that.