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Employment policies tend to focus on unemployed people, but evidence indicates that many people who are economically inactive also have labour market potential. This report from Eurofound (the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions) examines groups within the inactive population that find it difficult to enter or re-enter the labour market and explores the reasons why. The inactive population is heterogeneous. The report focuses in particular on four subgroups within it: people who report that they are in education, homemakers, retired or disabled. These subgroups vary greatly in terms of their characteristics and the barriers they face. It maps the characteristics and living conditions of these groups, discusses their willingness to work and examines the barriers that prevent them from doing so.

The report also looks at strategies being implemented by Member States to promote the inclusion of those outside the labour market. It highlights that many inactive people would like to work in some capacity, particularly students and homemakers. Stressing the importance of focusing on the specific needs of the inactive population in designing and implementing effective strategies for their labour market integration, the report argues that Member States should fully implement the 2008 European Commission Recommendation on the active inclusion of people excluded from the labour market.

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Youth Service: Not in Employment, Education or Training (or YS: NEET) is a [New Zealand] government programme designed to encourage and assist disadvantaged 16-17 year olds to stay in education or training and improve their qualification attainment. Community organisations are contracted to undertake needs assessments and provide mentoring and support for these youth. This paper evaluates the impact of the programme on the educational retention, qualification achievement, benefit receipt, inactivity and employment rates of participating youth in the 18-24 months after they enrol in YS: NEET. Administrative data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) is used to measure individuals' outcomes. The impacts of the programme are estimated by comparing the outcomes of participants with those of a matched comparison group of similar youth who did not participate.

[The authors] find that YS: NEET raises the educational retention of participants in the first year, by up to nine percentage points at peak. The proportion who complete a level 2 qualification is slightly raised, by around two percentage points. The programme appears to raise rather than lower participants' subsequent benefit receipt rates, and there is no improvement in their likelihood of being employed.

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In 2000, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) launched an initiative aimed at providing basic information and communications technology (ICT) skills to unemployed and economically inactive people. The initiative, 'UK online computer training', delivered courses through existing training providers from both the private and public sectors in a range of locations throughout the UK. This document reports on research used to evaluate the initiative, particularly its effectiveness in providing basic ICT training to the 'information poor' and the extent to which the training helped recipients to come off social security benefits and onto positive outcomes such as employment. The specific objectives were to: (a) identify all individuals participating in the training and their resulting outcomes; (b) identify the extent to which individual and other factors were related to participation and course completion; (c) identify and assess the factors which contributed toward coming off benefits and entering employment; (d) identify the extent to which courses have facilitated employment in comparison to the results of not participating in such courses. The report presents explanatory notes and summarised findings in relation to online participants, courses from the perspective of participants, training providers, and the impact of courses. Qualitative and quantitative research was undertaken and the appendices contain further information on the research method and the participants. Show less

Both technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and business management skills training have traditionally been viewed as key employment promotion instruments by policy makers. Many employment policies in developing and developed countries make reference to both types of training as tools to address unemployment. The underlying assumption is that the combination of these two types of skills building can yield higher impacts in terms of access to employment or self-employment opportunities. The author notes that little has been done to document and analyse how the different training contents and delivery mechanisms best go together. Do they produce additional benefits for those who have access to both types of training? How should institutions best structure the different types of training? This paper tries to provide first answers to these questions by reviewing recent initiatives of combining TVET with Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) enterprise management training in four countries and extracting first lessons.

Key messages about the combination of vocational skills and business skills training are that: (1) available qualitative evidence suggests positive outcomes for trainees; (2) there is growing evidence that the combination of services work better than a single service delivered in isolation; and (3) with hundreds of training outlets, many national TVET systems provide an excellent platform to selectively add on other training products and services, potentially enhancing labour market outcomes.

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Throughout the Middle East, unemployment rates of educated youth have been persistently high and female labor force participation, low. This paper studies the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to assist female community college graduates find employment. One randomly chosen group of graduates was given a voucher that would pay an employer a subsidy equivalent to the minimum wage for up to six months if they hired the graduate; a second group was invited to attend 45 hours of employability skills training designed to provide them with the soft skills employers say graduates often lack; a third group was offered both interventions; and the fourth group forms the control group. The analysis finds that the job voucher led to a 40 percentage point increase in employment in the short-run, but that most of this employment is not formal, and that the average effect is much smaller and no longer statistically significant four months after the voucher period has ended. The voucher does appear to have persistent impacts outside the capital, where it almost doubles the employment rate of graduates, but this appears likely to largely reflect displacement effects. Soft-skills training has no average impact on employment, although again there is a weakly significant impact outside the capital. The authors elicit the expectations of academics and development professionals to demonstrate that these findings are novel and unexpected. The results suggest that wage subsidies can help increase employment in the short term, but are not a panacea for the problems of high urban female youth unemployment.

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This paper discusses HORIZON, one of three Community Initiatives conducted between 1993 and 1994 in Germany. HORIZON is one of the first transnational human resource programs designed and implemented by the European Social Fund. Community Initiatives differ from national measures as they tend to focus on innovation, transnationality and the multiplier effect. They are project-orientated, such as vocational guidance and counselling, vocational training, job placement or social development training and they tend to have a qualitative structure. The objectives of the HORIZON Initiative were to improve job opportunities for the disabled and socially and economically disadvantaged and to assist their inclusion into society and at work. HORIZON has given the European Social Fund a socio-political dimension far beyond standard labour market policy. This paper presents an evaluation of this program carried out by the Research Unit for Vocational Training and the Labour Market Evaluation. The main objectives of the evaluation of the complete program were to evaluate whether the program reached the target groups, the vocational effects on the participants, how the participants accessed the program, what measures were offered, how the qualifications met them and how the program achieved transnationality. The HORZION project has now been extended as a new Community Initiative called Employment and the Development of Human Resources and now focuses specifically on disabled people.

The volume of collected papers is indexed at TD/INT 60.361. Show less

People in the UK are living longer, and the proportion of older workers in the labour force is increasing. The UK government's Fuller Working Lives (FWL) strategy aims to support individuals aged 50 years and over to remain in and return to the labour market and tackle the barriers to doing so. As the population and the workforce continue to age, to avoid a loss of labour, employers will need to increasingly draw on the skills of older workers. Employers will need to retain valuable skills of older workers, retrain them if they want to support workers to stay in the labour market and recruit them to maintain labour supply and gain the benefits of a multi-generational workforce. This publication encourages businesses to retain, retrain and recruit older workers and presents the benefits of a fuller working life.

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Tunisians are striving for the opportunity to realize their potential and aspirations in a country that is rich in both human and physical capital, but whose recent economic growth has failed to create enough opportunities in the form of good and productive jobs. This report highlights the main barriers that hinder the Tunisian labor market from providing income, protection, and prosperity to its citizens and proposes a set of labor policies that could facilitate the creation of better, more inclusive, and more productive jobs. The weak economic performance and insufficient and low-quality job creation in Tunisia is primarily the result of an economic environment permeated by distortions, barriers to competition, and excessive red tape, including in the labor market. This has resulted in the creation of an insufficient number of jobs, especially in the formal sector. To change this situation, policy makers need to address five strategic directives that can promote long-term inclusive growth and formality: foster competition; realign incentives, pay, and benefit packages in the public sector; move toward labor regulations that promote labor mobility and provide support to workers in periods of transition; enhance the productivity of informal workers through training and skills building; and reform existing social insurance systems and introduce new instruments to attain broader coverage.

Abstract from publisher’s website.

The contents are as follows: Overview (pages 1-11); Barriers to the creation of good-quality jobs in Tunisia: economic stagnation and private sector paralysis / Antonio Nucifora, Doerte Doemeland, and Bob Rijkers (pages 13-38); Overview of the main labor market indicators / Diego F. Angel-Urdinola and Anne Hilger (pages 39-53); Constraints to labor mobility and formalization / Diego F. Angel-Urdinola, Arvo Kuddo, David Robalino, and Jan Rutkowski (pages 55-100); Policy recommendations / David Robalino, Arvo Kuddo, and Diego F. Angel-Urdinola (pages 101-118); Appendix A: additional charts and tables (pages 119-121). Show less

Across many regional areas of Australia, food and fibre underpins the regional economies and supports the welfare of its communities. Many people hold negative perceptions of the sector, and food and fibre businesses commonly report finding suitable employees as a major barrier to growth and productivity gains. Traditionally there have been views across employers that employees should be 'job-ready' with little tolerance for those who do not meet expectations. Where businesses do wish to give job seekers with barriers to employment 'a go', often they do not have the capacity or skills to do so effectively. This Fellowship focused on social innovation and work across food systems in the USA and included participation in the 2019 Harvard Social Innovation Conference (SECON). The Fellowship has explored a range of innovative strategies, with an emphasis on place-based approaches which engage job seekers, government, industry, and other stakeholders.

The Fellowship had a broad focus on the following streams of inquiry, identifying: (1) strategies and practices to overcome the challenges of job seekers facing barriers to employment to secure and sustain employment, thus reducing the risk of their future long-term labour force exclusion; (2) strategies and practices that demonstrate new and innovative approaches to engaging employers in the delivery of employment support to job seekers facing barriers to employment; (3) place-based or innovative strategies to support job seekers impacted by changing employment and industry landscapes (e.g. loss of major employers, increased patterns of young people migrating from regional to metropolitan Victoria, other) to enter mainstream employment; and (4) best practice government intervention to delivering employment support to job seekers facing barriers to employment. A varied set of recommendations have been described under the themes of: supporting social innovation and enterprise across regional food systems; supporting industry in being recognised as businesses 'for good'; and place-based strategies, which include a focus on systems leadership and governance.

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The [International Labour Office] ILO's Employment Intensive Investment Programme (EIIP) works in over 70 countries linking employment with infrastructure development. The EIIP promotes labour-based technologies that offer major advantages in terms of using investments in infrastructure to create work and income-generating opportunities, and to build the skills and capacities of local communities. This guide is the outcome of a study carried out on gender and public works, and has been developed using evidence from 43 EIIPs implemented in 27 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America between 1995 and 2013. The guide illustrates good practices when incorporating a gender dimension into the different stages of the project cycle, namely, during identification, design, appraisal, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.

The guide is presented in five sections: Overview of EIIP as a policy for employment creation; Gender equality in EIIP targeting and identification; Gender equality in EIIP design and appraisal; Gender equality in EIIP implementation, monitoring and reporting; and Gender equality in EIIP evaluation.

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