A Swedish local authority is paying young people to up sticks and look for work in neighbouring Norway, reports The Daily Telegraph and other media outlets.

People aged between 18 and 28 from the town of Soderhamn, 260km north of Stockholm, will be offered a ticket to the Norwegian capital of Oslo and up to a month’s accommodation in a youth hostel while they look for work, after the town teamed up with Norway’s national employment office.

Soderhamn, situated on the east coast of Sweden, is 500km from Oslo and has 25% youth unemployment, slightly higher than the national youth unemployment rate, although nationwide joblessness is just 7.8%.

In an article on the scheme, The Washington Post asks: “So what do you do when you’re a town of 12,000 with a youth unemployment problem? Make it some other town’s problem, apparently.”

EU-wide joblessness hit 11.6% yesterday, a new high.