Impact evaluation of youth employment measures

How effectively are young people supported on the labour market? The “Youth Employment PartnerSHIP” project aimed to answer this question by evaluating employment initiatives targeting youth in Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain.

The European Youth Guarantee (EYG) was introduced in 2013 to combat youth unemployment. Five years on, policies resulting from EYG still lack comprehensive evaluations in a cross-country framework. The countries participating in the project share common challenges of high youth unemployment and low capacity to perform high quality impact studies of youth employment Initiatives.

The project evaluated two sets of initiatives:

• outreach activities of Public Employment Services (PES) and
• job trials/job subsidies for youth,

with a particular attention to the gender dimension of policy targeting and outcomes.

We used harmonized methods of evaluation based on similar administrative data, which are little explored in CEE and SE Europe. These evaluation studies were complemented with RCT (Randomized Control Trials) experiments in Hungary, Poland and Spain to assess which interventions have the potential to boost outreach to inactive, unregistered youth.

In addition, the project built capacity in research institutions to implement evaluation studies of employment initiatives by  internships for PhD students, seminars and workshops on evaluation methods for researchers from other institutions. The Budapest Institute organised an international research seminar and a conference for PES practitioners. It also promoted the use of impact evaluation among policy-makers in order to improve the design of youth employment policies. All project outputs are available at the project website.

The project is funded by a 1.8 million € grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment. It is implemented by a consortium of six institutions in four countries, led by the Institute for Structural Research, Poland. The Budapest Institute leads the comparative analysis of outreach strategies and also contributes by preparing an impact evaluation of selected youth wage subsidies in Hungary.