Evaluation of a Flemish Active Labour Market Policy in the framework of the European Social Fund. Results and challenges

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the “Work Experience for Young Persons” (WIJ) programme, which was implemented in Flanders between 2015 and 2018. The WIJ programme is partially financed through the European Social Fund (ESF) and targets unqualified, young, and unemployed people with the aim of facilitating their entry to the labour market. The programme involves a trajectory of intensive guidance that includes labour market orientation and coaching as first phase, plus competence strengthening activities as second phase. This analysis is based on the Flemish Public Employment Service’s administrative data sources, which allows us to exploit detailed information on previous labour market history. We apply Coarsened Exact Matching to evaluate the WIJ’s impact on young unemployed people specifically in terms of their probability of being employed, unemployed or inactive, and of re-entering into education. Our results suggest that those who have participated in the WIJ programme have lower employment and education probabilities with respect to those who participated in the standard activities proposed by the public employment service. However, we found a positive employment effect if we only consider those who participated in the standard trajectory, i.e. those whose WIJ intervention lasted fewer than 14 months; this means that the negative effects are driven by those young individuals following the extended trajectories.