An Evaluation of Job Creation in Germany

Abstract

The growing awareness in the past few years of the increasingly acute nature of unemployment levels throughout industrial society has been reflected in the adoption by a variety of countries of a number of special work creation schemes for social groups experiencing particular difficulties in finding and sustaining employment. While cynical commentators in individual countries have dismissed in varying degrees such programmes as being essentially synonymous with the special employment measures of the Great Depression, there seems little obvious justification or merit in identifying, for example, Job Creation in Britain with the former Public Works Programme; the Neighbourhood Youth Corps, Emergency Employment Act and the more recent Comprehensive Employment and Training Act in the US with the New Deal Public Relief Acts or the “ArbeitsBeschaffungsMassnahmen” in Germany with the ReichsArbeitDienst. While the new schemes may at their weakest moments reflect a superficial similarity with aspects of such older programmes, there is little doubt that, in the main, job creation measures of whatever type, which have been introduced since the early 1970s, differ in scope, orientation and intention from their traditional public works predecessors. Such an interpretation seems not only to be supported by the fact that countries which introduced such schemes some years ago, are continually updating, revising and refining the structure and conditions of their programme and evaluating their performance in meeting the needs of the client groups but that such early experiences and their subsequent restructurings constitute examples of particular manpower policy initiatives which continue to be followed as operating models for countries newly embarking on programmes of a similar type.