Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Training Measures of the Public Employment Service

In many OECD countries, training is a key component of active labour market policies to combat unemployment. Despite high financial investments and the need for rigorous impact analyses as a basis for improving policy design, the available evidence is patchy. Above all, the analyses conducted so far are not sufficiently differentiated. The present study contributes to closing this gap. More comprehensively and in a more differentiated way than before, it examines how the different types of training provided by the Public Employment Service Austria affect the labour market opportunities of different groups of unemployed people. Among other things, a distinction is made according to type of provider, content, type of qualification, intensity, and target group orientation. The evaluation focuses on the causal effects of participation in the years 2013 to 2017 on labour market integration and income of the participants in the six years after programme start. It shows that on average, all of the evaluated measures have a positive effect on individual labour market participation and employment opportunities of the treated unemployed. However, not all courses are the same. The measures implemented by the Public Employment Service are very heterogeneous, both in their design and in their effect.