With increasing prosperity, West European youth is having a fling that is creating distinctive consumer and cultural patterns. The result has been the increasing emergence in Europe of that phenomenon well known in America as the 'youth market.' This is a market in which enterprising businesses cater to the demands of teenagers and older youths in all their beatlemania and pop-art forms. In the United States, the market is wide-ranging and well established, almost an industry, which with this country's emphasis on 'youthfulness,' even extends beyond teenager groups. As in the United States, youthful tastes in Europe extend over a similar range of products-records and record players, leather jackets and 'wayout,' extravagantly styled clothing, cosmetics and soft drinks. Generally it now is difficult to tell in which direction trans-Atlantic teenage influences are flowing. Also, a pattern of conformity dominates European youth as in this country, though in Britain the object is to wear clothes that 'make the wearer stand out,' but also make him 'in,' such as tight trousers and precisely tailored jackets. Worship and emulation of 'idols' in the entertainment field, especially the 'pop' singers and other performers, can be viewed as another similarity. There is also the same exuberance and unpredictability in sudden fad switches. In Paris, buyers of stores catering to the youth market carefully watch what dress is being worn by a popular television teenager singer to be ready for a sudden demand for copies. In Stockholm other followers of teenage fads call the youth market 'attractive bat irrational.' Actually, the scope and nature of the youth market varies considerably from country to country, being large and lively in some and only beginning to show itself in others. But there are also these important dissimilarities generally with the American youth-market: In the European youth-market, unlike that of the United States, it is the working youth who provides the bulk of purchasing power. On the average, the school-finishing age still tends to be 14 years. This is the maximum age to which compulsory education extend, and with Europe's industrial manpower shortage, thousands of teenage youths may soon attain incomes equal in many cases to that of their fathers. Although, because of general prosperity, European youths are beginning to continue school studies beyond the compulsory maximum age, they do not receive anything like the pocket-money or 'allowances' of American teenagers. Working youth, consequently, are the big spenders in the European youth market, but they also have less leisure than those staying on at school, but these in turn have less buying power. According to the passage, the youth market is one that ______ .