International Handbook Of Labour Market Policy And Evaluation

A guide to different national labour markets and policies to combat unemployment and their outcomes. It provides an account of the rapidly growing field of labour market policy, focusing on issues such as cost-benefit analysis and school to work transition.

Bringing together contributions from leading labour market policy scholars from across the globe, this state-of-the-art Handbook offers extensive and compelling analyses of labour market policy in advanced democracies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book argues that active labour market policies are necessary to improve the position of the unemployed but have so far performed relatively poorly. The contributing authors seek ways to improve active labour market policy and consider three means of doing so: improving the quality by better targeting and by better-designed measures, more efficient implementation and delivery, and better performance by benchmarking the various implementation agencies involved.

Empirical measurement of impacts of active labour market programmes has started to become a central task of economic researchers. New improved econometric methods have been developed that will probably influence future empirical work in various other fields of economics as well. This volume contains a selection of original papers from leading experts, among them James J. Heckman, Noble Prize Winner 2000 in economics, addressing these econometric issues at the theoretical and empirical level. The theoretical part contains papers on tight bounds of average treatment effects, instrumental variables estimators, impact measurement with multiple programme options and statistical profiling. The empirical part provides the reader with econometric evaluations of active labour market programmes in Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Slovak Republic and Sweden.

This book examines the effectiveness of active labour market policies and their contribution to the prevention of social exclusion. The evaluation studies reported in this volume focus on two aspects of active labour market policies that have been relatively neglected in previous research and merit special attention. The first part of the book deals with aggregate impact analysis. Using examples from France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain, the contributors attempt to estimate the impact of active labour market policies on the transition from unemployment to employment using aggregate data at the regional level. Although quantitative in nature, these contributions take into account qualitative aspects such as the socio-economic context of the countries concerned and the structure of active labour market policies. The book then focuses on implementation issues and includes implementation studies carried out in Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden. The qualitative element plays a far more important role in these contributions which rely on case studies and surveys in addition to statistical data.

Active labor market policies (ALMPs) are found in almost all countries of the world but differ in amplitude, design, and implementation. Comprising an array of measures, ALMPs can take the form of special support for job searching, training and education for the unemployed, and various other subsidies and job creation activities. While providing a valuable overview of the nature of these policies, this book examines some of the pitfalls and challenges countries face when evaluating them. It also provides a policy framework for designing ALMPs that are permanent yet adaptable instruments to cope with changes linked to globalization. Contents Introduction Historical background of ALMPs Definition and functions of ALMPs Contribution of ALMPs to the objectives of employment creation, security in change, equity and poverty reduction Differences in the utilization of ALMPs: Developed, transition and developing countries Evaluation of ALMPs New trends in ALMPs Conclusions: A framework for the management of change Bibliography

Modern labor economics has continued to grow and develop since the first volumes of this Handbook were published. The subject matter of labor economics continues to have at its core an attempt to systematically find empirical analyses that are consistent with a systematic and parsimonious theoretical understanding of the diverse phenomenon that make up the labor market. As before, many of these analyses are provocative and controversial because they are so directly relevant to both public policy and private decision making. In many ways the modern development in the field of labor economics continues to set the standards for the best work in applied economics. This volume of the Handbook has a notable representation of authors - and topics of importance - from throughout the world.