Jaap de Koning – författare

This book argues that active labour market policies are necessary to improve the position of the unemployed but have so far performed relatively poorly. The contributing authors seek ways to improve active labour market policy and consider three means of doing so: improving the quality by better targeting and by better-designed measures, more efficient implementation and delivery, and better performance by benchmarking the various implementation agencies involved.The book also contains detailed descriptions of the new delivery systems in Australia and the Netherlands. These are countries that have privatized a considerable part of the implementation of reintegration services for the unemployed and therefore can provide valuable lessons.The Evaluation of Active Labour Market Policies will appeal to a wide audience including researchers and scholars of labour economics, sociology and political science. Policymakers within ministries and other public organizations and NGO's dealing with labour market issues and partners, will also find much to engage them within the book.

This book examines the effectiveness of active labour market policies and their contribution to the prevention of social exclusion. The evaluation studies reported in this volume focus on two aspects of active labour market policies that have been relatively neglected in previous research and merit special attention.The first part of the book deals with aggregate impact analysis. Using examples from France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain, the contributors attempt to estimate the impact of active labour market policies on the transition from unemployment to employment using aggregate data at the regional level. Although quantitative in nature, these contributions take into account qualitative aspects such as the socio-economic context of the countries concerned and the structure of active labour market policies. The book then focuses on implementation issues and includes implementation studies carried out in Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden. The qualitative element plays a far more important role in these contributions which rely on case studies and surveys in addition to statistical data.