Do youth employment programs improve labor market outcomes? A quantitative review (original) (raw)
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Do Youth Employment Programs Improve Labor Market Outcomes? A Systematic Review
Social Science Research Network, 2016
This study reviews the evidence on the labor market impact of youth employment programs. We analyze the effectiveness of interventions, and factors that influence program performance including country context, target beneficiaries, program design, implementation, and evaluation type. We identify 113 impact evaluations covering a wide range of methodologies, interventions, and countries. The meta-analysis synthesizes the evidence based on 2,259 effect sizes (Standardized Mean Differences) and the statistical significance of 3,105 impact estimates (Positive and Statistically Significant). Just more than one-third of youth employment program evaluations worldwide show a significant positive impact on labor market outcomes-either employment rates or earnings. In general, programs have been more successful in middle-and low-income countries; this may be because programs' investments are especially helpful for the most vulnerable population groups that they target. We conjecture that recent programs might have benefited from innovations in design and implementation. In middle-low income countries, skills training and entrepreneurship programs have had a higher impact. In high-income countries, the role of intervention type is less decisive-much depends on context and how services are chosen and delivered, a result that holds across country types. We find evidence that programs integrating multiple interventions more likely succeed because they respond better to different needs of beneficiaries. Results also point to the importance of profiling and follow-up systems in determining program performance, as well as to incentive systems for services providers.
There are two kinds of policy intervention -preventative and curative. A preventative intervention tries to counteract the processes that generate a problem; a curative intervention tries to deal with their consequences. In the case of poverty, for instance, a curative intervention will find out where the poor are and try to alleviate their situation; a preventative intervention will analyze the causes of poverty and devise strategies to prevent it. In the case of youth employment policy, there is a similar distinction: this paper tries to shift the emphasis from curative towards preventative interventions -from treating the symptoms to dealing with the underlying causes 2 .
Factors Affecting Youth Employment in Ethiopia: A combination of attitudes, behaviors, interventions, and context, 2019
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program, Building the Potential of Youth Activity (POTENTIAL) was designed to address unemployment and underemployment of youth 15 to 29 years of age in rural areas and towns (peri-urban settlements), to attain skills, knowledge, and social capital that leads to increased income and long-term economic self-sufficiency for youth and their households. POTENTIAL plans to directly benefit 34,537 youth in Afar, Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, Somali, and Tigray Regional States with a total budget of $5 million USD over five and one-half years. Youth POTENTIAL (here after referred to as YP Activity, or YPA) is guided by the principles of meaningful youth engagement, leveraging community, public and private partnerships, collaboration, learning, gender equity, and market orientation. In 2017, USAID contracted with Social Impact (SI) to implement the Ethiopia Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Service (EPMES) Activity, which a youth cohort study (YCS) of the same 458 youth 15-29 years of age in the YPA was conducted over a period of 12 months. In 2018, the EPMES concluded YPA, "A significant increase in self-employment was recorded among study respondents between the time of enrollment in the YP Activity and twelve months following the enrollment." However, the YCS did not examine factors associated with youth gaining employment, especially self-employment, which was larger than gains in wage employment. Using data from interviews from a randomly selected representative sample of youth in the YPA in 2017, multivariate regression analysis was used to investigate factors that were meaningfully related to helping youth gaining selfemployment after graduating from YPA. Study design-Six-months after graduating from YPA in 2017, a follow-up outcome study was conducted from a randomly selected, representative sample of 2,072 from 5,000 youth ranging from 15 to 29 years of age. Sample-Of these 2,072 sampled youth, 1,501 (732 young women and 769 young men) had entered YP unemployed and, thus, were included in this analysis on predictors of obtaining self-employment. Research Questions and Analytic Strategy-This analysis attempts to answer three questions: 1) Was the rate of unemployed young women gaining self-employment significantly different than unemployed men gaining self-employment 6-months after completing YPA training? 2) What are the best predictors of young women who entered YPA unemployed gaining self-employment 6-months after completing the training? 3) What are the best predictors of young men who entered the YPA unemployed gaining self-employment 6-months after completing the training? The analytic strategy is based on the use of multivariate logistic regression models to test the statistical significance of a set of factors to predict the probability of self-employment among young women and young men who entered YPA unemployed. Main findings-Young women were 35% less likely to have gained new employment than young men (OR 0.650, CI: 0.52 to 0.81), but the effect-size of this difference is very small ( =0.001) and, thus, is not 6-2 Log Likelihood=556.69, p<0.000 7 Nagelkerke's R2 = 0.53 View publication stats View publication stats
Youth employment: a human development agenda for the next decade
2013
This paper reviews the main challenges facing countries in attempting to improve labor market outcomes among youth, focusing on the issues that became starkly visible during the recent financial crisis. In order to better identify and set up human development interventions, the paper proposes an agenda that focuses on three areas: (1) improving the understanding of the causes and consequences of poor labor market outcomes for youth; (2) continuing to learn from the evaluation of pilots and programs that aim to promote productive employment among young people; and (3) addressing implementation issues which frequently overwhelm the best designs. The paper utilizes research on youth employment to take stock of youth labor market outcomes across regions, focusing on inactivity, unemployment, and employment indicators. A review of what is known about current interventions, including those that appear in the Youth Employment Inventory database of programs, provides the basis for determining the efficacy of five categories of intervention: (i) skills training (including vocational training, on-the-job-training programs, literacy and numeracy programs, second-chance and equivalency programs, and soft-skills programs); (ii) entrepreneurship promotion (financial assistance, technical assistance, and entrepreneurship training); (iii) subsidized employment (including wage subsidy programs, public works, and public/community service programs); (iv) employment services (including search assistance and access to labor market information, job counseling and placement services, and financial assistance for job search); and (v) reforms to labor market regulation (including anti-discrimination legislation) training programs, wage subsidies. Finally, the 1 The team thanks Jean Lee and Afia Tasneem for their support for this project. 2 paper proposes an agenda for research and policy analysis in the area of human development that is expected to help both deepen the understanding of youth employment issues and improve the selection, design, and implementation of youth employment programs.
Employment for Youth: A Growing Challenge for the Global Community
2013
Social and economic challenges facing young people today must be understood in terms of the complex interaction between unique demographic trends and specific economic contexts. There has been an unprecedented growth in the number of young people in the Global South in the past two decades, and these youth face situations where the forces of economic globalization interact with historically determined national and regional economic structures and policies. Although we will argue that unemployment is only a partial measure of employment inadequacy for youth, especially in poor countries, its ready availability and widespread use make it an important starting point. While we strive to take a global perspective on youth employment challenges, our focus in this paper is on the developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We focus primarily on youth ages 15 through 24 but sometimes also consider 25- to 29-year-olds because there is growing evidence that the transition to adultho...
Global Inventory of Interventions to Support Young Workers Synthesis Report
Box 1: ECA wage subsidies for young people-An example of programs designed to make the labor market work better for young people (Category 1)……………………….16 Box 2: The Commonwealth Youth Credit Initiative-An example of programs designed to improve chances for young entrepreneurs (Category 2)……………………..…………19 Box 3: Entra 21-An example of programs designed to provide skills training for young people (Category 3)……………………………………..…………………………………21 Box 4: Kenya's Jua Kali voucher program-An example of programs designed to make training systems work better for young people (Category 4)…..………………………….24 Box 5: Evaluation within a cost/ outcome framework-a mini-manual…………………………..27 Box 6: LAC's Jovenes programs-An example of comprehensive multiple-service approaches (Category 8
While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that disadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot program that targets low-skilled young unemployed and combines three components: a) individual coaching, b) classroom training and c) temporary work. Using an ex-post quasi-randomization approach, our analysis shows that the program has a positive impact on the post-program employment probability of participants.
Toward solutions for youth employment : a 2015 baseline report
2015
Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) were launched in October 2014 as a multi-stakeholder coalition to positively disrupt the youth employment landscape. S4YE is a partnership initiated by the World Bank, Plan International, the International Youth Foundation (IYF), and Youth Business International (YBI), RAND, Accenture, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) with a view to contributing to a world where all youth have access to work opportunities. The mission of S4YE is to provide leadership and catalytic action and mobilize efforts to significantly increase the number of young people engaged in productive work by 2030. It seeks to develop innovative solutions through practical research and active engagement with public, private and civil stakeholders, to enable solutions for all youth at scale. This inaugural report explores how S4YE can find and advance solutions to the challenges of getting all youth into productive work.